Local level Brexit vulnerabilities in Scotland: Brexit Vulnerabilities Index (BVI)

1. Introduction

There has been a wide range of analyses of the potential impacts that Brexit may have on Scotland. These have typically assessed the expected impacts on individual sectors and the Scottish economy as a whole. This report complements such analysis by using highly disaggregated local area datasets to assess the vulnerability to Brexit of different communities across Scotland, and the underlying factors which drive this.

The second chapter summarises previous analysis of the economic implications of Brexit at a Scotland level, and identifies the key factors that have been shown in previous research to be most likely to determine an area's vulnerability to Brexit.

Chapter 3 explains the methodology and data used to produce the community level analysis presented in this report. The analysis combines a number of different indicators which measure a community's vulnerability into a single overall indicator. This illustrates how the level of vulnerability to Brexit varies across Scotland. The analysis is undertaken at datazone level.^[6] There are nearly 7,000 datazones covering the whole of Scotland. Datazones are small area geographical units used for statistical measurement with a population of around 770 people. Chapter 3 also summarises the results across Scotland as a whole. This highlights the communities identified as being the most vulnerable and how the results vary by local authority and settlement size.

Chapter 4 summarises the interactive mapping tool, which has been developed as a part of this project, explaining the key features for users. An interactive map is available at https://bit.ly/30W1UVQ which allows the results for individual datazones to be easily identified. The underlying dataset used to produce the analysis is also provided online to allow users to understand how varying underlying assumptions can impact on the overall results.^[7]

There are three annexes. Annex 1 contains detailed tables from the analysis. Annex 2 contains an explanation of how the Brexit Vulnerability Index was composed. Annex 3 contains a full list of acronyms used in the report.