Brexit: Overseas firms create less jobs due to uncertainty

Brexit-related uncertainty may have led to about 1,000 fewer jobs being created by overseas firms in Northern Ireland.

That is the conclusion of a study commissioned by Stormont's Department for the Economy.

The analysis focused on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Northern Ireland, assessing what FDI performance may have been like in the absence of Brexit-related uncertainty.

The study only considered new FDI projects.

It created a "synthetic" Northern Ireland using data from a group of comparable EU countries and regions not affected by the Brexit referendum.

From this, it estimates that in the absence of uncertainty an additional 1,036 FDI-related new jobs could have been created in the two years after the Brexit vote in June 2016.

The biggest impact was on potential FDI from EU investors.

It did not look at the impact of the expansion of existing projects or at jobs created by GB companies in Northern Ireland.

The study concludes that while uncertainty persists in regard to the UK's future trade relationship with the EU, the UK and Northern Ireland are likely to continue to become less attractive to FDI.