Foreign workers are leaving the UK in droves, the country facing the worst exodus since World War II. This threatens an economy already undermined by Brexit and the coronavirus, writes Bloomberg.
700 thousand people left London alone last year. “The risk is that people may not return, there will be a labor shortage and the country will permanently lose some of its production and tax revenues,” said Jonathan Portes, professor of economics at King’s College London.
He believes that over a million foreign workers have already left the country. In the long term, this can also exacerbate the demographic problem.
The British economy experienced its worst recession in 300 years in 2020. The Bank of England announced that the country’s GDP fell by 9.9 percent last year.
The last time the economy contracted so much was in 1709, when GDP collapsed by 13.4 percent. The reasons were the War of the Spanish Succession, as well as the ultra-cold winter of 1708-1709, which was the most severe in Europe over the past 500 years.