Rural Scotland Business Panel Survey

Footnotes

1. The HIE Business Panel report is available on the HIE website here; the SOSE Business Panel report is available on the SOSE website here.

2. The Scottish Government's six-folder Urban Rural Classification is described on the Scottish website available here.

3. Travel to Work Areas (TTWAs) are a statistical tool used by UK Government and local authorities to indicate an area where the population would generally commute to a larger town, city or conurbation for the purposes of employment. The TTWAs were developed in 2011 by Newcastle University using an algorithm to identify community patterns.

4. UK Business Counts enterprises by industry and employment size band available here.

5. Scotland's Economic Strategy identifies growth sectors are available here.

6. In this report sole trader refers to any business that said they had no employees at the time of the survey (though it is recognised that the term sole trader can also include businesses that have employees but who retain sole ownership of the business).

7. The net confidence figure is the difference between 'increased' and 'decreased'. Net scores are negative when negative assessments exceed positive.

8. This question was asked openly, allowing businesses to interpret "women-led" for themselves. However, for those that asked for clarification of what this meant, they were provided with the Scottish Government's definition: "controlled by a single woman or having a management team composed of a majority of women."

9. Note this is a different measure to the earlier question (in figure 3.2) which showed those saying that cost of labour was the increase they were most concerned about. The figure here is among employers only, the earlier one was among all businesses.

10. The exception was businesses exporting goods and services outside the UK using or planning to use mobile app development – this was in line with the average.

11. Changes to import arrangements were not defined, but would include changes such as additional customs processes and checks on goods being imported into Great Britain from the EU

12. Rural Scotland Key Facts 2021 – available here.