User Guide
A modern open economy like that of Scotland engages in 4 basic economic activities:
Production
involves industry and commodity sectors producing goods and services
Consumption
represents purchases of goods and services by both industries and domestic final users comprising mainly households and Central and Local Government
Accumulation
involves all capital transactions including all fixed investment expenditure and stock change
Trade
involves imports from, and exports to, the rest of the UK ( RUK) and the rest of the world ( RoW)
The input-output tables and multipliers for Scotland serve a number of purposes, all of which contribute in different ways to our understanding of the Scottish economy.
Output and supply table
In broad terms, the output and supply table allows the user an appreciation of the absolute monetary values of each industry's output for a given calendar year. Additionally, and possibly more importantly, this table also presents the relationships between the output of products and the output of industries - e.g. key statistics are produced on the extent of diversification within industries and the extent of competition between industries producing the same product.
The Use matrix
The combined use matrix shows the purchases of commodities and primary inputs, in terms of combined domestic and imported goods and services, used in each industry's production process and, in doing so, presents a comprehensive description of the domestic production functions of Scottish industries.
Symmetric tables
In addition to the descriptive value of the tables noted above, the derived symmetric tables also provide the tools for economic impact analysis, which is the one of the main uses of the IO tables once they have been published. The derived industry by industry and commodity by commodity matrices present very similar information to the use matrix outlined above; but present the information on a common (symmetric) basis. The industry by industry presentation allows the interdependence of industries to be formally examined as each industry is shown as intermediate purchasers of their own and other industry's output. These interdependencies are shown in standardised form in the Leontief inverse matrices, which show, for each industry, the direct and indirect (type I) and direct, indirect and induced (type II) effects upon total output of an additional £1m of final demand. These latter tables are the key tools used in input-output based impact analyses.
The following sections describe the key input-output tables published annually, beginning with the two basic balances - the supply table (summarising the make matrix and imports) and the use table. Descriptions of the industry by industry matrix and multipliers are then given. Each section aims to give a brief overview of each table, showing clearly what the data represents and how it can be used for analysis.
Acknowledgements
The latest tables were constructed by the input-output statistics branch of the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser: Stevan Croasdale, Donna Hosie and Jan Young. Acknowledgements are also due to our colleagues in the Office for National Statistics and the Input-Output Expert Users Group.
Note: This and the following sections of the user guide have been adapted from the 1998 Input-Output Tables and Multipliers for Scotland (ISBN 1 84268 439 6)