Deficit debate

I note that Fraser Grant in his letter (19 November) makes the same assertion previously made by Mary Thomas and Gill Turner in your columns, that Scotland has a balance of trade surplus. This is not so.

Mr Grant makes the statement that “Scotland has a trade surplus and has vast natural resources”. I shall not comment on the natural resources statement as it is difficult to quantify what “vast” means, but there are statistics available that attempt to quantify the particular issue of the Scottish balance of trade.

Scotfact states on its website: “According to the Quarterly National Accounts for Scotland released in October 2018, Scotland’s onshore economy in 2017 exported £81,096m and imported £95,537m. This results in an estimated onshore trade deficit of £13,631m.”

Statista also has a section on Scottish trade. Its figures for 2018 are exports £87,715m and imports £97,184m, leaving a deficit of £9,469m.

There is a degree of estimating involved in calculating these figures, as inter-trade between the four UK nations is included, but the gap is much wider than any associated uncertainty.

The conclusion must be, therefore, that Scotland is

currently running a trading deficit of around ten per cent.

Since the Scottish national budget is in deficit, whichever way you calculate GERS, the trading deficit has to be added to an independent Scotland’s annual borrowing requirements.

JOHN PETER

Monks Road, Airdrie, Lanarkshire