Scottish Government

The long-term aim of SNAP is to produce a wider range of economic statistics outputs on a consistent basis through time. This would build on the range of statistics already produced.

There are two strands to this project:

1. building on the annual Input-Output framework for Scotland to produce more up-to-date estimates of income, expenditure and production GDP in value terms; and
2. using UK quarterly National Accounts and other data sources, to produce a greater range of balanced and consistent quarterly economic indicators for Scotland.

This work will be undertaken incrementally and dynamically (i.e. revised over time as new information becomes available to ensure consistency with UK National Accounts definitions and classifications where possible).

Planned developments

The following is a sample of some of the planned developments to be conducted as part of SNAP:

• Building on the review of the Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland (GERS) publication to produce calendar year revenue estimates as an input into the I-O system;
• Estimating a Scottish Basic Price Adjustment to convert Gross Value Added (GVA) to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for onshore activity in Scotland;
• To improve GVA estimates for Scotland's share of offshore activities using various assumptions;
• Working with ONS to improve the quality of the Regional GVA estimates;
• To improve estimates of trade statistics between Scotland and the rest of the world and, in particular, with the rest of the UK;
• Producing estimates for Gross Fixed Capital Formation for Scotland reflecting known capital investment projects where data are available;
• Investigating input prices in addition to output prices for Scottish producers, leading to a double-deflated constant price Input-Output system;
• Investigating benchmarking/anchoring the short-term GDP (output) figures to the constant-price Input-Output tables to provide more consistency between our macro-economic outputs and greater scope for meaningful analysis for users;
• Estimating household accounts for Scotland - including gross disposable household income by component, household expenditure and savings;
• Producing a balanced quarterly GDP series, in money terms, for Scotland;
• Producing implied deflators for Scotland.