Bank advances to Scottish agriculture: 2017 survey results

1. Main findings

Total outstanding bank loans to agriculture were £2.32 billion, up from £2.20 billion last year.

Change since last year

Real terms ^[1] change since last year

Long term trend in outstanding bank debt ¹
1980-2017

Liabilities by type 2017

What does “in real terms” mean?

It shows, for previous years, the value of the debt expressed in today’s prices. This is because, for example, a loan of £10,000 in 1990 could have paid for something that nowadays would need a loan of £20,000, so we say the 1990 loan was worth £20,000 in today’s prices.

To do this we simply multiply our data on previous years’ debts by the amount prices have gone up since then. In our example prices have doubled, so we multiply the 1990 debt by two to see what it would be worth in today’s prices. For these multipliers we use the GDP deflator, from the Office for National Statistics ( ONS) ^[2] .