Consequences of Brexit for Trade and Economic Cooperation between the EU and the UK in 2020-2023

While major international organisations with different spheres of interaction, such as NATO, the WTO and the UN, despite the challenges, expanded in the international political arena, the sudden withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union with its announcement marked several key aspects for the European Union. Firstly, the United Kingdom officially became the first member of the European Union to leave the organisation, which gave an end to the non-negotiable numerical expansion of the European Union, as well as singled it out relative to other above-listed international organisations. In addition, the United Kingdom faced a serious challenge, which it condemned itself to: leaving the European Union had extremely ambiguous prospects regarding economic aspects. Since the announcement of the referendum results, economists have predicted economic costs for the United Kingdom, which in their impact on the country were incomparable with a similar impact on a political organisation. Thus, Brexit provided the basis for the analysis of economic components through the perspective of the impact of the consequences of this decision. However, a separate factor of attention was the period long before Brexit itself. In the background of the interaction between the two political actors, there was a set of extremely ambiguous at first glance political and economic decisions that were taken by the United Kingdom throughout the entire period of relations with the European Union. This work, despite the main focus on the impact of Brexit on trade and economic cooperation between the European Union and the United Kingdom in the period from 2020 to 2023, also analyses the background of actors' interaction through the prism of international relations. The economic component of the work consists of analysing data related to trade interaction between two actors through the following economic components: firstly, the trade and economic cooperation of two actors is analysed based on trade data by economic sectors, including the volume of exports and imports of goods and services, as well as their shares relative to each other; secondly, the flow of investments from The European Union to the United Kingdom and to the rest of the world. The aim of the work is to identify the impact of Brexit on economic and trade cooperation, as well as to track trends inherent in the background of interaction between the two actors and analyse these trends through the prism of international relations.