G8 benefits

It's really not fair. As economic consultants, you push the data as far as you can - even going so far as to count gross income as a net benefit, while suggesting that police overtime paid to English police counts wholly as a net economic benefit to Scotland. And you tot up all of the foreign press references as if they had to be paid for as advertising space. And, eventually, you come up with the right answers for your client, the Scottish Executive, even if it has only earned you a measly £60 grand.

And are the yellow press happy? Instead of praising your imaginative innovative approach to economic analysis, The Herald reports:

"Figures claiming Scotland made a profit from hosting the G8 summit were arrived at by taking every news item on the conference and attributing to this the cost of buying that amount of advertising, civil servants conceded yesterday. The claims, that the long-term figure for free advertising could reach more than £600m, have been derided by the business community. Graham Birse, deputy chief executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, said: "If we were
buying £600m of worldwide publicity for Scotland, I hardly think we'd use it to show pictures of rioters trashing Princes Street Gardens. At the end of the day, Scotland, and Edinburgh in particular, delivered magnificently for the G8, and we can be proud of that. But to suggest we have made some fantastic financial gain beggars belief." Tom McCabe, the finance minister, welcomed the report by consultants SQW, claiming the £60m cost to the Scottish Executive for the lion's share of hosting the event was offset by almost £65m going into the economy around that time. SQW also claimed the immediate publicity in July was worth £66m in free advertising, and could reach more than £600m."

while The Scotsman was even more scathing:

"SCOTTISH ministers were accused last night of "shoddy accounting" over a report which concluded that Scotland would make millions of pounds in profit from staging this summer's G8 summit.
The report, funded by the Scottish Executive, claimed the money generated through G8-related spending outweighed the cost to Scottish taxpayers of staging the event by nearly £5 million - a figure angrily dismissed by business leaders.
A second claim - that global coverage of the summit at Gleneagles in July was worth more than £600 million in advertising - was also attacked by marketing experts, who said the figure was "highly questionable".