This is a blog site that is determined to bring back a spirit of enquiry to the economic debate in Scotland. Some agreed facts would be a useful start, but even this seems beyond us at the moment with such things as the GERS figures being lauded or dismissed by folks depending on what conclusions they are driving. Getting decent statistics is not easy and, of course becomes more difficult by the day, as ever more data is collected as new marketing segments (groups of people described in the abstract by political activists) are invented.
In fairness, Government statistics should always be taken with a grain of salt; after all they are mostly submitted by businesses themselves and in my experience, the accuracy of submissions is rarely a task given high priority. Nevertheless there is no shortage of data out there and I started with a look at the Scottish Government website, which to be fair is fairly navigable. As this blog is looking for evidence of economic innovation I started with the Department of Trade, Innovation and Public Finance – Minister Ivan McKee. The Minister is not all that well known to the public, but a quick look at his bio was mildly re-assuring – he has some business experience. So that was a good start.
I opened up by looking at Scotland’s Vision for Trade, a 93 page document published at the end of 2020. I was working through it line by line before I realised that had made a mistake. It seems that, behind the day to day noise in Scottish Politics at least there are some areas of Government that are busy. Very quickly, I noted references to the following documents, Scotland a Trading Nation, Scotland’s Economic Performance, National Performance Framework, Scotland’s Economic Strategy, Innovation Strategy, Economic Action Plan, Trade and Investment Strategy, Scotland’s Inward Investment Plan, Infrastructure Investment Plan, Others. Given this there’s going to be a lot further reading for me.
At this stage, provisionally, there are some interesting observations, which are:
- These documents are happily free of loaded political language, and are long but well presented.
- They are, I would say “devolutionist”, in other words they outline strategies that make use of the UK scale and reach with respect to facilitating international trade.
- They strongly support increasing Scottish exports (internationalising the Scottish Economy) and acknowledge that we have lagged in this area over the last decade or so; apparently in Scotland’s Economic Strategy 2015, a target for export increases of 50% was set. We’ve achieved 35% they say. Increasing Scottish exports will not endear the Minister to the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) , indeed when one scans the body of work it makes one realise that the folks who are trying to push MMT as official SNP policy have a near impossible task; The Growth Commission report may be gathering dust somewhere in Edinburgh, but the philosophy lives on.
- The general thrust of these documents seems to me to remain very conservative. They are (rightly) hesitant in picking winners, but the policies (to increase exports) seem to focus on more of the same. Scottish Enterprise, trade fairs, promotion of the Scottish brand etc.
- There is a load of stuff about “social justice” in the reports, and there may be a danger that many additional barriers will be erected for any exporting firm.
- There is nowhere near enough on the supply side. Human Capital is mentioned but beyond trying to attract immigration there is not enough emphasis.
- In the high level documents, I’ve not seen anything about business rates or corporation tax, or indeed how we can create more businesses in the country.
- There is a welcome commitment to try and improve data and statistics.
That’s enough from me at the moment. It’s going to take a while but I will get through these documents and will hopefully blog out some summaries of the “strategy” as well as the sources of information, or reproduce them at a high level. If we can agree on the data then maybe we might be able to agree on other things.
Make Scotland Better 