What if?

For years, indeed for decades, we have been told that Scotland has an under-performing economy and that our economic growth rate lags behind that of the UK as a whole. Indeed, the new Scottish Executive (sorry, Scottish Government) has made it a central theme of its economic policy to seek to improve Scottish growth to bring it in line with that of the UK.

But what if it's not true? What if Scottish growth has not been lagging behind? What if, over the past ten years, the Scottish economy has been growing at a rate comparable with that of the UK (which as the Prime Minister keeps telling us is one of the best-performing economies in the G7)?

Such is the prospect offered by a new academic report by the Centre for Public Policy for Regions. To be fair, they do not go quite as far as I have suggested in the previous paragraph but there is a clear implication that the growth of the Scottish economy in recent years may have been under-estimated.

Alf Young in The Herald (here) and Hamish MacDonnell in The Scotsman (here) try to get to grips with the implications, not entirely successfully, I would suggest. It does, after all, take a bit of re-thinking to get to grips with the idea that Scotland may just have a successful economy on its hands.

Here's tae us, wha's like us? A bit premature, perhaps. It's only an academic report, after all.