GDP Quarterly National Accounts: 2024 Quarter 2 (April to June)

Revisions

In this release, Scotland’s GDP has been open for revision back to 2022 quarter 1. All estimates from 2021 onwards remain provisional, while annual estimates for earlier years are constrained to the Supply and Use Tables for 1998-2020, published on 29 November 2023. Details of revisions to GDP growth of each broad industry can be found in the downloadable GDP by volume tables, while revisions to the nominal value of other key statistics are detailed in the downloadable other national accounts summary tables.

Revisions to GDP growth and the nominal value of other components have been made in line with our revisions policy for economic statistics, and are due to updated source data and re-estimation of outputs. The main sources of revisions in this release are updates to the equivalent UK national accounts which provide key inputs for the output of many industries and other components of income and expenditure. Revisions in other industries are due to routine updates of source data, and late or revised returns to the monthly business survey.

For GDP in volume terms, the overall trend since the beginning of 2022 is broadly unchanged in the latest estimates, but with upward and downward revisions from quarter to quarter.

For other components of GDP, estimates of household, NPISH and government final consumption expenditure have been revised up, reflecting the latest UK statistics, while estimates of exports remain broadly unrevised. Estimates of imports have also been revised up, partly due to residual balancing adjustments for supply to meet the upwardly revised components of demand.

Further revisions to GDP growth can be expected in the next quarterly national accounts when estimated will be reweighted and constrained to the annual Supply and Use Tables for 1998-2021.  

Measurement of GDP and consistency with results for the UK as a whole

There are some differences between the estimates for Scotland and the UK after 2019 due to the faster timescales for updates at UK level and differences between methodologies used. While the level of output in some industries and in total GDP are still broadly comparable to the UK as a whole, for many industries those comparisons should be made with caution. Specifically, whilst the UK statistics for real terms GDP growth are based on double deflated gross value added (GVA) for 2020, 2021 and 2022 (that is, the prices of both outputs and inputs are separately accounted for), the estimates for Scotland are only double deflated up to 2019 and the estimates for 2020 onwards are based on output only.

Learning from the experience at UK level, where the introduction of double deflated estimates for 2020 in September 2022 led to large downward revisions to GDP, which were then largely reversed by large upward revisions when double deflated estimates were introduced in September 2023, we are waiting until we can produce double deflated estimates for both years before introducing them into our time series at the same time. This development is intended to maintain stability in the estimates for Scotland, but at the expense of some comparability with the figures for the UK as a whole. On current timescales, we are likely to introduce double deflated GDP for 2020 and 2021 in the release for 2024 Quarter 3, following the production of Supply and Use tables for 1998-2021 (autumn 2024) based on the ONS Regional GDP statistics for the same period (summer 2024) which are derived from the ONS Blue Book 2023 statistics released on 31 October 2023.

Users should continue to be cautious about drawing conclusions based on comparisons between Scotland and the UK or other countries for the periods when the economy was most severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, or comparisons of relative levels of GDP compared to the pre-pandemic level. The estimates of GDP from 2020 onwards are continuing to evolve as more data becomes available, and it is likely that these results will change again in future releases.