GDP Quarterly National Accounts: 2023 Quarter 2 (April to June)

In this release, Scotland’s onshore GDP has been open for revision back to 2020 Q1. Estimates up to 2019 are constrained to the latest annual supply and use tables. Revisions have been largely driven by updates based on the data drawn from the latest comparable UK GDP statistics, which have been similarly revised based on the results of the UK Blue Book 2023.

In particular, we have made revisions to the industry series which are estimated based directly on the equivalent results for the UK. For example where output in Scotland is provisionally estimated to grow in line with GVA for the UK as a whole (e.g. public sector health output or mining support services), or where output in Scotland is provisionally based on a share of UK GVA derived from employment (e.g. construction, insurance and pensions) or some other measure of activity (e.g. financial services). There is a sources guide available with information on the data sources used for each industry.

This is the first time that quarters earlier than 2023 have been open to revision since the estimates for 2022 Quarter 4. Other revisions are due to more routine updates to survey data and other sources, including late responses, additional quality assurance and data cleaning, and updated seasonal adjustment and deflators. These impacts can extend all the way back to 2020.  

The scale of revisions to quarters and years since 2020 Q1 can be seen in the table below. There are relatively large upward revisions to growth in 2021 in particular. Overall, GDP in volume terms is now estimates to be higher relative to the pre-pandemic level in 2019 Quarter 4 than it was in the previous estimate. The largest contribution to this revision comes from health services, where output in Scotland is provisionally estimated to move in line with the UK as a whole for the years after the latest supply and use tables for 2019. Growth in the latest three quarters is unrevised at the headline level.

In other components of GDP, there are also revisions back to the start of 2021. In many cases these revisions also reflect equivalent updates in the latest UK national accounts where we base our estimates on a top-down share of the UK estimates, or where these components are linked to the results of the output approach to GDP. The estimates for Household final consumption expenditure have been also been revised due to updated data from the Living Costs and Food Survey published in the ONS Family Spending release, and a review of the apportionments of UK results based on this data. There are also revisions to the RUK imports and changes in inventories components due to the balancing adjustments to ensure that estimates of total supply and demand for each type of product in the economy remain consistent with each other in all quarters.

Table 1: Revisions to percentage growth rates compared to the first estimate for Quarter 2

*Revisions may appear different to the calculated result due to rounding in the results