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© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-62666-9
T.A. Falianty
Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia
ABSTRACT: On 23 June 2016, an important moment in British history was the referendum
on Brexit. In this referendum the majority of the people of the United Kingdom (51.9%) voted
for Britain to leave the European Union (EU), after more than 40 years of being part of this
giant political and economic block. Several analyses have been made regarding the impact on the
global economy. Dhingra et al. (2016) for example, analysed the consequences of Brexit for the
global economy especially for EU members and concluded that all EU members would be worse
off. As an open economy Indonesia would also be impacted directly and indirectly. This paper
quantitatively measures the impact of Brexit on the Indonesian economy. The methods used
to measure the impact are Vector Auto Regression (VAR) method and Global Vector Autore-
gression (GVAR). VAR and GVAR method assess the impact of Brexit through the capital,
financial, and foreign exchange markets (interest rate, exchange rate, and equity market) result-
ing from increased global uncertainty. Indonesia’s economic relations with United Kingdom in
the monetary and real sectors were assessed, and the result shows that the direct impact would
be modest. The impact of Brexit is stronger in the monetary/financial channel than in the real
sector channel (GDP, trade and investment). The global VAR model conducted a simple cor-
relation analysis and found that the impact of Brexit on China is stronger than on the euro-
zone. Several policy anticipations could be derived from this research to minimise the loss of
Brexit to Indonesian economy as well as Indonesian society, such as anticipating indirect effect
from China and increasing credibility of government to manage market expectation because we
found stronger financial response from Brexit (stock market, exchange rate, and interest rate).
1 INTRODUCTION
In 2015 David Cameron was elected as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK). At
the time of his campaign, he promised to hold a referendum to decide if the UK should stay or
leave the European Union (EU). He kept his promise and scheduled a referendum on British
membership in the European Union for 23 June 2016, in the UK and Gibraltar. The results of
the referendum showed that the UK public decided to leave the EU by a majority of 51.9% on
a national turnout.
Booth (2016) points out that the primary reason for Brexit is that many people in different
regions and occupations in the UK were worried about large-scale immigration from Eastern
Europe. The global financial crisis in 2008 which impacted UK as the world’s financial centre
was also cited as a reason.
As a result of this issue 2016 many investors became worried and moved their assets to other
countries for investment when they found out that UK would be holding a referendum. That is
the reason why the UK’s currency value (pound sterling) decreased after the Brexit vote. This deci-
sion make UK’s economy go down and many people predicted that it would be the beginning of
a recession in the UK. Besides this, it was predicted that UK would get different treatment from
the EU. Further consequences would be that unemployment in EU would increase, the economy
would slow down, stocks around the world would decrease and sterling would depreciate.
An analysis of the impact of Brexit was conducted by Dhingra et al. (2016) which included
the effect on European countries, especially the issue of funding. Because of Brexit, EU
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Table 1. The effects of Brexit on UK living standards according to Dhingra et al. (2016).
Optimistic Pessimistic
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Most exposed
Malaysia 52.34 Medium Low
Hong Kong 40.2 Low Medium
Vietnam 49.3 High Low
Singapore 58 High High
Middle of the pack
Thailand 41 High High
Taiwan 38.5 High High
Korea 29.8 High High
Philippines 24.4 High High
Least exposed
Indonesia 21.6 High Low
India 19 Low/Medium Low
China 17.2 Medium High
According to an analysis by Nasser (2016), in Credit Suisse Report, in order to face the
impact of Brexit, monetary policy is likely to support growth, and the policy used is mon-
etary easing. Bank Indonesia (BI) has done monetary easing through cutting BI policy rate.
Although BI has cut 100 basis points (bps) year to date, falling inflation trend means that
Indonesia still has further room to cut rates. They believe that BI monetary policy easing was
not enough; BI can further cut rates by 50–75 basis points and by 50 bps to support growth.
According to their analysis in Table 2, Indonesia has a high monetary policy space and is thus
in a position to be the least exposed country from Brexit.
2 METHOD
When there is no confidence that a variable is actually exogenous, each variable can be treated
symmetrically, using the basic method of the Vector Auto regression Model (Enders, 2015).
The VAR model simultaneously processes all involved variables to link to each other directly
and non-directly. However, this may not be the real case for the global economy.
VAR may be able to describe the interactions of variables in an economy, but might not be
able to model the global economy (i.e. the interactions of several economies). Beside standard
VAR for one (single) country model, it could be available in the Global VAR model (GVAR).
Global VAR could elaborate several countries in the world.
A simple VAR model can be used for the case of a two-country model. Country 1 is Indo-
nesia for example, and Country 2 is the UK. A two-country model (c1 & c2) consists of two
macroeconomic variables (y & z), and one global variable (x). For simplicity of equation
representation the optimum lag of ‘1’ is used as an example.
Country 1:
y_c1 = C(1)*y_c1(−1)+C(2)*z_c1(−1)+C(3)*x(−1)+C(4) + e1
z_c1 = C(5)*y_c1(−1)+C(6)*z_c1(−1)+C(7)*x(−1)+C(8) + e2
Country 2:
y_c2 = C(9)*y_c2(−1)+C(10)*z_c1(−1)+C(11)*x(−1)+C(12) + e3
z_c2 = C(13)*y_c2(−1)+C(14)*z_c1(−1)+C(15)*x(−1)+C(16) + e4 (1)
414
xit δi δ t + Γ i1xit−
it 1 + Γ i xit
it 2 + Λ i 0
∗
it + Λ i1xit∗ 1 + Λ i 2 xit∗ − 2 + ε it
N
xit∗ = ∑ wij x jt
j =1
N
∑w
j =1
ij = 1, and wii = 0 (2)
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Table 3. Indonesian FDI from UK, US, Japan and Singapore in USD millions.
Year UK FDI EU FDI Japan FDI US FDI Singapore FDI Total FDI
Figure 2. FDI level (USD million) and FDI share (%) from UK.
Source: Indonesia Investment Coordinating Agency (BKPM).
Note: LHS: Share (in percentage).
RHS: USD millions.
largest investment in Indonesia. The UK’s investment value is still below Singapore, United
States, Japan and the EU (Table 3). However, compared to EU countries, UK has the second
largest investment after the Netherlands. Thus, in terms of investment, the UK’s influence
is relatively larger than the trade influence. FDI from the UK had an increasing trend from
2010–2014, but following global uncertainty it declined in 2015 (Figure 2).
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Variation
Period Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max coeff.
Before Brexit January 2010– IDR 940 9776.574 835.1505 7872.1 12788.8 8.5424
September 2013 USD 940 1.0566 0.0792 0.8609 1.3701 7.4955
EURO 940 0.7937 0.0497 0.6726 0.9654 6.2601
POUND 940 0.6718 0.0407 0.5874 0.8475 6.0569
October 2013– IDR 666 13427.53 608.5322 12311.6 15175 4.5320
May 2016 USD 666 1.0628 0.0466 0.9703 1.1778 4.3828
EURO 666 0.8790 0.0578 0.8082 1.0227 6.5759
POUND 666 0.6789 0.0224 0.6436 0.7784 3.2977
After Brexit June 2016– IDR 62 13547.03 207.1654 13170 13933 1.5292
August 2016 USD 62 1.0267 0.0107 1.0062 1.0452 1.0398
EURO 62 0.9193 0.0052 0.9024 0.9274 0.5621
POUND 62 0.7619 0.0304 0.7004 0.7996 3.9860
Indonesia 0.0034 –
United Kingdom – 0.0102
According to Rana (2016), the UK’s major trading partners are the EU, the USA, China and
India. China is an important trading partner for the UK.
We could also see Trade in Value Added (TiVA) of UK to get the picture of trade rela-
tions with UK partners. TiVA of UK considering the value added by each country partner
in the production of goods and services in UK. TiVA indicator below presented share of
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UK partner contribution in UK exports. Indonesia has only around 15% share in the UK’s
gross exports (see Figure 5) which also supports the prediction of the low impact of Brexit
on direct channels.
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Table 7. Correlation of Economic Growth between Indonesia (INA), US, UK, Europe, and China.
To support the figures on economic growth correlation, trade relations between UK and
other countries could be explored. The top five UK import-trading partners in 2015 were:
The United States: USD66.5 billion (14.5% of total UK exports)
Germany: 46.4 USD billion (10.1%)
Switzerland: 32.2 USD billion (7%)
China: 27.4 USD billion (5.9%)
France: 27 USD billion (5.9%)
(Data source, World Top Exports, 2016.)
USA is the first import-trading partner of UK, while Germany is in second place. China is
in fourth place with a share of 5.9%. From the Chinese side, in 2015 the UK was the seventh
import-trading partner, with a 2.6% share. In first place was USA, with Germany in fifth
place. It can be concluded that one of the reasons for a high correlation between China and
the UK’s growth is related to trade relations.
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Table 8. Correlation of overnight interest rate between Indonesia (INA), UK, China, US, and Euro.
Table 9. Correlation of equity market volatility between Indonesia (INA), UK, China, US, and Euro.
market has a higher correlation with the Hang Seng Index and Straits Times Index (STI)
Singapore. However, the short-term impact of Brexit has been proven in the stock market
reaction including Indonesia.
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423
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2.6.1.2 China
2.6.1.3 Europe
From the GVAR analysis using Mauro and Pesaran (2013) toolbox and data, it was found
that the impact to Europe is larger compared to that of China and Indonesia. The impact to
Indonesia is low but persistent.
425
2.6.2.2 China
2.6.2.3 Europe
426
2.6.3.2 China
2.6.3.3 Europe
427
2.6.4 Impact of UK positive LIBOR shocks to several countries’ Real Exchange Rate
(RER)
2.6.4.1 Indonesia
2.6.4.2 China
2.6.4.3 Europe
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3 CONCLUSION
It can be concluded that the direct impact of Brexit on Indonesian economy would be modest
especially in real sector channel (GDP, trade, and investment), but one should be careful pre-
dicting the indirect impact from the UK-EU and UK-China relationships. Indonesia has a
moderate/relatively weak correlation in terms of economic growth and trade channel with the
UK, but indirect effect from China could (possibly) work. The close economic relationship
between UK-China and Indonesia-China could become the potential source of Brexit impact
channeling to Indonesia. Beside UK-China relationship, the second indirect effect of Brexit
to Indonesia could also come from the UK-EU relationship. The second important finding
from this research is the evidence that Brexit impact is stronger in the monetary/financial
channels (stock market, exchange rate, interest rate), than real sector channels (GDP, trade,
and investment). The VAR results show some consistencies with analysts’ predictions on the
impact of Brexit on the Indonesian economy. However the VAR result related with impact to
GDP still not consistent with common opinion. On the other hand, the GVAR result for the
impact to GDP is consistent with market opinion and theoretical prediction. This prelimi-
nary assessment could be investigated further.
Several policy implications could be derived from these results. First, the possible indirect
effect from China and eurozone countries should be anticipated. The anticipation is that
policies will include increasing economic partnership with countries that currently have a low
relationship with UK (non-traditional countries). Second, the credibility of government and
the central bank to manage market expectation should be increased because a stronger finan-
cial response to Brexit was found (stock market, exchange rate and interest rate). Increased
credibility could increase the benefits of the condition depreciated pounds sterling. Third,
the potency of the domestic economy should be increased to compensate for the negative
impact of Brexit. Indonesia’s economic size and population size (represent demographic
bonus and potential market) could be used beneficially to face the impact of Brexit.
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APPENDIX
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