IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/not/notnic/2026-06.html

Levelling up by levelling down: The economic and political costs of Brexit

Author

Listed:
  • Eleonora Alabrese
  • Jacob Edenhofer
  • Thiemo Fetzer
  • Shizhuo Wang

Abstract

The study uses a synthetic control method to estimate the local economic cost of Brexit. The vast majority of regions in the UK have lost as a result of Brexit. Since losses tend to be concentrated in relatively prosperous regions, Brexit has reduced regional inequalities (“levelling up“) while pushing down national output (“levelling down“ in the aggregate). Using both aggregate data from local elections and individual-level survey data from the British Election Study, we find that, politically, those areas that experienced Brexit-related out- put losses saw increases in support for right-wing populist parties, while the electoral fortunes of the Labour party declined.

Suggested Citation

  • Eleonora Alabrese & Jacob Edenhofer & Thiemo Fetzer & Shizhuo Wang, 2026. "Levelling up by levelling down: The economic and political costs of Brexit," Discussion Papers 2026-06, Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP).
    • Handle: RePEc:not:notnic:2026-06
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/nicep/documents/working-papers/2026/2026-06.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:not:notnic:2026-06. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Hilary Hughes (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nicepuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.