The Scottish Government

The Scottish Budget Draft Budget 2010/11 was published on September 17th.

The Draft Budget itself can be found here:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2009/09/17093831/0

The accompanying High Level Carbon Assessment document can be found here:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/budgetcarbonassessment

Scottish IO Team
September 2009

In 2008 the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth made a commitment to publish estimates of the Green House Gas emissions associated with the planned government spending as detailed in the Scottish Government Draft Budget, scheduled to be published in September 2009.

The commitment by the Cabinet Secretary is an ambitious one. A range of experts acknowledged in evidence to the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee that the carbon assessment of spend is a complex process and that there is no single recognised estimation methodology. Recognising the challenging nature of the task, the Scottish Government convened an expert workshop at the end of November 2008 to discuss the merits and limitations of different methodologies, and identify the most appropriate way forward. Having considered a number of possibilities, Environmental Input-Output (EIO) analysis was identified by the contractors as providing the best option to provide a high level assessment of the impact of Government spending on emissions.

The Office of the Chief Economic Adviser has been working with economists and researchers in the Scottish Government Rural and Environment Analytical Services to extend the current IO model to include GHG emission intensities from ONS Environmental Accounts. We have also been working with Scottish Government Finance colleagues to map individual draft budget spend lines on to the industrial classification required for the EIO analyses.

The plan is to publish the modelled analyses alongside the Scottish Budget within a separate High Level Carbon Assessment document. The very clear message will be that these are initial estimates of GHG emissions. In this context, it is important to see the assessment this September as a developing approach (without precedent in government accounting), with further work required over time to develop the accuracy and functionality of assessment techniques.

This will be important because, from 2010, there will be a statutory requirement for the Scottish Government to publish GHG emissions estimates along side their spending plans. The intention, in the longer term is to work towards developing the methodology and to agree a publication strategy that would sit within the pre-announcement and pre-release access required of Official Statistics.

A link to the Draft Budget and the accompanying High Level Carbon Assessment document will be placed here once they are published in September.

Scottish IO Team
August 2009

The Scottish Input-Output Tables, Supply and Use Tables and associated analyses rely heavily on the UK Supply and Use Tables. As a result of the UK National Accounts re-engineering programme it was not possible to construct 2005 and 2006 Scottish Supply and Use Tables. This was discussed in the Input-Output Expert Users Group (IOEUG) and agreed that Scotland should use 2008 to develop time series consistent Supply and Use tables and associated analytical tables. This work was completed and published in March 2009. For more information about the Scottish Supply and Use table publications plans and decisions for 2008 please see papers and minutes from the IOEUG May 2007 meeting.

Since publication of the 1998-2004 tables, we have been working with ONS colleagues to obtain sufficient UK Supply and Use Table data to allow construction of more up to date tables. ONS published the UK 2004-2007 Supply and Use tables at the end of July 2009 and the agreements are now in place to begin to receive the data required to produce the Scottish tables.

The Scottish IO team are now beginning to construct the raw 2004-2007 tables and plan to publish these in 2010. It is not possible at the moment to be more specific about when the new tables will be ready for publication; high levels of work on developing the new High Level Carbon Assessment of Government Spending, staff changes and the system changes required to deal with the new, post re-engineered ONS National Accounts System Supply and Use Table data are all playing a part. For more information please see the papers and minutes from the IOEUG May 2009 meeting.

Updates will be posted here when available.

Scottish IO Team
August 2009

Published on 31st March 2009, the latest tables relate to 1998 to 2004. These are the first Scottish time series consistent tables and replace previously published tables for these years, which were published as annual snapshots. The tables are available in the downloads section of this site.

Overall, this set of tables uses the same methodology as the original 2004 tables, which were published in December 2007. The main methodological changes are:

Finance Sector

Some of the industries relating to financial intermediation have been merged, namely '100.1 - Banking' and '100.2 - Other Financial Institutions' were merged to be just 100, and '102.1 - Auxiliary Financial Services nec' and '102.2 - Auxiliary to Insurance' were merged to be just 102.

The reason for merging these is that, for IOCs 100.1 and 100.2, there is no longer any real difference in the activities these industries carry out - the activities of building societies are largely indistinguishable from banks, and for IOCs 102.1 and 102.2 there is no up-to-date reliable data source available to allow us to update these figures.

Financial Intermediation Services Indirectly Measured (FISIM)

According to the European System of Accounts 1995 (ESA95) there are 2 methods of allocating FISIM in the Input-Output tables. The simplest way, which we have used in previous years, is to treat FISIM as a nominal industry with negative GVA. The second option is to quantify the value of FISIM 'supplied' to each of the intermediate and final demand sectors. Since the UK I-O tables have now adopted the second, more complicated, method we now have the necessary data to allow the Scottish I-O tables to be produced in the same way.

For more information on FISIM and the revised methodology please these papers from the SESCG meeting:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Economy/ScotStat/Oct08Paper3

and the article in SES 2008:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2009/01/29150444/7

Scottish IO Team
March 2009

The Scottish Input-Output Tables, Supply and Use Tables and associated analyses rely heavily on the UK Supply and Use Tables and are constrained to the Regional Accounts based estimates of Gross Value Added ( GVA) at the 31 industry level (and financial intermediation services indirectly measured).

The UK National Accounts systems and methods are undergoing a major overhaul as part of the Office for National Statistics statistical modernisation programme. The National Accounts re-engineering programme is aiming to deliver quarterly and annual Supply and Use Tables in both current prices and previous years' prices going back to 1997. To facilitate this process, the Input-Output Analytical Tables produced by the ONS were suspended in 2003, and the ONS 2007 annual Blue Book exercise did not include the production of the 2005 Supply and Use Tables, revisions to earlier Supply and Use Tables, annual benchmarking of quarterly sources onto annual survey results, amongst various other stored revisions including the allocation of financial intermediation services indirectly measured. This in turn affects the Regional Accounts as the UK control totals by industry, by sector and by type of income are generated through the production of the Supply and Use Tables process.

As a result, there will be no UK Supply and Use Tables, Input-Output publication or associated analyses until around September 2008. More details of the modernisation work can be found on the ONS web site: www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/article.asp?ID=1737 .

These changes also affect the publication of ONS Regional Accounts estimates of GVA at the industry level such that in the 2007 December publication, the industrial detail will not be published.

As a result of these changes, publication of the 2005 Scottish Input-Output Tables, scheduled for December 2008, will also be delayed.

After consultation with the Input-Output Expert Users Group, it was agreed that ONS re-engineering provided the opportunity to work on the planned development of consistent times series Input-Output Tables for Scotland. The group was consulted on a range of options and it was agreed we would begin the development of a full set of 1998-2004 tables as soon as the 2004 tables were published. Please see the May 2007 meeting on the Expert Users Group web site (part of SCOTSTAT) for further information about this decision: www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/scotstat/economy/groups .

Scottish IO Team
December 2007