Future Developments
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.
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 I-O 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 FISIM. 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, I-O publication or associated analyses until around September 2008. Please see this article on the ONS web site for more details of the Modernisation work.
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Accounts estimates of GVA at the industry level such that in the 2007 December publication, the industrial detail will not be published.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 discussions 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 time series of Input-Output tables for Scotland. The original plan to introduce additional time series consistent annual tables over a period of several years was changed. The current plan is to begin the development of a full set of 1998-2004 tables as soon as the 2004 tables are published. Please see the May 2007 meeting papers on the Expert Users Group web site (part of SCOTSTAT) for further information about this decision.