Lies, damned lies and statistics on the UK’s EU membership

How would leaving the European Union affect the UK’s economy? Iain Begg writes that with pro-EU and anti-EU campaigning groups now officially up and running ahead of the UK’s planned referendum, British voters will undoubtedly be confronted with a series of contradictory claims and counter-claims on the costs and benefits of membership. He argues that it would be unwise to take any of these claims at face value and that the best any researcher can hope to produce is a range of projections, hedged with health-warnings about the reliability of the estimates or the accuracy of the scenario depicted.