Italy is now living basically on the debt funded by Northern European countries and soon this might come to the end with the widening spreads and markets not believing Italy’s ability to serve its debt. Either the money printer must brrrr, with massive inflation, or Italy, maybe Greece and Spain to default their bonds.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/some-european-state...
"For all that, debt sustainability is not an imminent risk."
The UK is in far worse shape because Brexit has nuked a huge hole in the economy. 4% is about £80bn a year.
But the real problems are systemic and political. The UK has been taken over by a far right cabal of criminals and opportunists who think nothing of wasting tens of billions of government - in addition to Brexit - while demonising asylum seekers and those on low earnings as a distraction.
Britain has the potential to be a powerhouse, but its political class is one of the least competent and credible in all of the G20.
The UK’s been ruled by a relatively small hereditary aristocracy for, what, 1,000 years? A self-interested political class is hardly a new phenomenon there.
Still, all of the examples of her meddling are in laws that apply to the royal family. There aren't any (known) examples of her putting her thumb on the scales of public policy. Not that that makes it a whole lot better, but it still falls short IMHO of "ruling the country." I think she knows that if she tried to do that it would be the end of the monarchy.
On the flip side, David Camerons grandfather was a recipient of slavery reparations which indebted the country for 150 years but created inter-generational wealth for a small elite of merchants, slave traders and the like. So he may not be a hereditary lord, but it's not exactly a far cry from it, either.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/money/2019/...
Britain is washed up and will take years to recover from Brexit and Tory rule, if ever.
You could argue that at that point the UK no longer exists to recover and thus “if ever” is a pretty realistic outcome if the decline continues for much longer and the resentment in the outlying areas continues to grow.
The EU lost the exact same amount in that exchange and had to substitute it with inferior or more expensive goods and services from elsewhere.
So no, the UK is not in far worse shape as they can open up to the rest of the world and the EU cannot because it's built around the principles of self-isolation and trade barriers.
Why the UK hasn't done as much after Brexit is a different problem. Sadly, Johnson has turned to be useless, although not nearly as useless as May. I'd like to see a "UK Trump" take over for a while. It's very hard to do worse than the two main parties.
The EU is likely to find it easier to get useful trade deals as it has more recent experience of writing trade deals, partly because it does that for its members, and partly because the UK government doesn’t trust British people who worked for the EU to get that experience.
The UK also has limited room for getting significant alterations to the terms of imports to the UK in any trade deals, because every deal that contradicts EU rules represents another thing that has to be checked for with NI—GB trade.
That said, the UK appears to be very good at getting a large quantity of trade deals, by the cunning method of giving the counter-party whatever they ask for at negligible cost, so the British negotiators can get themselves another headline with the words “trade deal” in it.
https://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/policy-brief/2022/co...
One of the several issues is with how the “dopplegängers” are selected. A basket of (weighted) countries is selected with economic structures and pre-Brexit performance similar to the UK. I haven’t analyzed the linked Python code and datasets, but the text gives scant information on what exactly makes a specific country similar or dissimilar to the UK.
The rare exception is when it compares UK’s GDP growth with Australia’s and New Zealand’s instead of Italy’s, when it says it ignored the latter because of its “rapidly ageing” population.
In the “Services trade” rubric, UK actually outperforms the dopplegänger, until the author removes the country with the largest weight, at which point the UK’s advantage disappears. This could be interpreted as some questionable data massaging.
None of which is to say that I necessarily think Brexit was, or will be, an economic success for the UK. This is not something that can be easily determined at this point, especially with Covid. But these studies should be taken with a grain of salt.