There were economic opportunities missed

Productivity in Scotland has failed to increase under Nicola Sturgeon but the country lacks some of the powers to influence day-to-day activity, according to economist Mairi Spowage.

The director of the Fraser of Allander Institute, an influential centre of economic research, said: “Successive governments in Scotland have had ambitions to boost productivity and business investment, research and development.

“It has been difficult to shift the dial in a number of these issues, particularly productivity, where our performance hasn’t really moved since 2007 and certainly hasn’t improved since 2015.

“When you look at the powers in the Scottish Government’s arsenal to tackle some of these issues, many of the levers aren’t in their gift.

“They tend to have levers which are more about the long-term drivers of productivity around skills and the sorts of investments that they’re trying to make like childcare in early years for the long-term benefit of the economy.

“These tend to be longer-term, slower-moving levers to impact on productivity, whereas they don’t have short-term measures on fiscal policy that could potentially influence productivity.”

But she said that the Scottish Government could have done more to capitalise on the country’s potential for renewable energy development.

According to a Fraser of Allander report last year, renewable energy supports around 23,000 jobs in Scotland with economic output of £5 billion a year.

Spowage said: “There are huge opportunities here in terms of our natural resources to develop renewable energy technologies and generation, but also to develop supply chains to create new high-wage, hi-tech jobs in Scotland, which to some extent will offset the jobs that we might be losing in the oil and gas industry.

“I think many would acknowledge that some of those opportunities might not have been taken in the earlier days of renewable energy generation.

“Some of the parts for wind turbines, for example, were not manufactured in Scotland but perhaps could have been if the supply chain had been developed in the earlier days and there was more support for that.

“There’s definitely the case that an opportunity was missed and other countries have overtaken Scotland in some areas.”