1. In 2023, Josh Martin and I published a brief analysis of how Brexit affected UK business investment. We looked at what happened to UK business investment after the Brexit referendum (June 2016) relative to the trend leading up to the referendum (1997-2016). We found that "Our estimate indicates that business investment was about 10% less than it would have been absent Brexit in 2022.
2. The article "How has Brexit affected business investment in the UK", was here. The Twitter feed was here. A spreadsheet supporting the calculations was here.
3. We now update the same analysis to 2026Q1 and find a shortfall of about 13% i.e. had pre-referendum investment trends continued, investment in 2026Q1 would have been about 13% higher. Given volatile data, it is also useful to look beyond the latest quarter – taking the past four quarters together, the shortfall is 11.5%. The picture looks like this
5. Figure 3 in the Economics Observatory post compared “business investment” across G7 economies. Business investment is defined by the UK ONS as total economy investment excluding investment by government and investment in dwellings (houses). It is not an international standard measure, so is hard to compare across countries. We identified some measures published by other statistical institutes which are comparable in concept, and in a couple of cases we constructed our own measure from available country sources. This spreadsheet updates business investment estimates for G7 economies with data up to 2026 Q1. The picture is below:
