This paper provides a comprehensive time series of historical National Accounts for Scotland (onshore and offshore) from 1948 to 2018. It includes a detailed breakdown by income component and industrial sector using methods that are forward and backward compatible. Through this work we offer new insights on the performance of the post-war Scottish economy, including its relative performance to the UK and its industrial makeup. Our findings also provide, for the first time, a full picture of the totality of Scotland's economy over the last 70 years by incorporating an estimate of North Sea oil and gas gross value added from within Scotland's territorial waters.

The design of subnational fiscal frameworks shapes how tax and spending choices affect fiscal sustainability. Using Scotland as a case, we show that its fiscal health depends crucially on how the UK Government manages its own sustainability. National and subnational fiscal sustainability are interconnected. Differences in factors like demographics and health between Scotland and the UK also influence fiscal outcomes. These dynamics must inform any debate on reforming the UK's fiscal frameworks, especially if further devolution-including to English regions-is pursued.

Claims that there was a lack of accountability had been part of the backdrop to campaigns for a Scottish Parliament. Accountability had been one of the four principles that informed the Consultative Steering Group, set up by the UK Government to draw up procedures and working practices for the Scottish Parliament. After a discussion of different types of accountability, the paper considers the extent to which greater accountability has been achieved with particular reference to fiscal matters. It does so by considering the situation that prevailed before devolution and in the period from 1999–2016 then the period since 2016, the last involved greater fiscal responsibility. It maintains that whilst there has been greater fiscal accountability, there remain weaknesses in the system of governance. Using primary data, including archival sources, interviews with key participants, as well as public papers, we argue that vertical accountability has improved significantly with devolution but are more equivocal about horizontal accountability and that diagonal accountability has been only partially improved though largely due to developments beyond the competence of devolved institutions.

This paper analyses the impact of secession on the 'seceding' and 'successor' regions. A two-regions computable general equilibrium model is initially calibrated to a set of synthetic datasets where the regions only differ in relative size and trade integration. Using the case of two identical regions as a benchmark we show how relative size and trade integration determine the relative impact on both regions. This framework is used to explore three European case studies, the UK, Spain and Italy, demonstrating how, although always detrimental for both regions, trade integration and relative size explain the economic impacts of new trade borders.

Urban leaders are increasingly seeking to navigate to net zero emissions whilst balancing wider economic and social priorities. Facing the leaders tasked with delivering these ambitions are a set of boundary challenges, including in relation to time, geography, governance and policy. We explore the practical steps leaders are taking to manage these challenges in Scotland's four largest cities - Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Our contribution identifies that visible city leaders are: driving actions through a fragmented institutional landscape in the absence of formal arrangements; balancing practical with strategic challenges in embedding long-term thinking; and, leveraging external sources, including the use of data, to inform change.

Prior to devolution, a significant majority of Scots believed that their new parliament would greatly improve the performance of the Scottish economy. We show that, in the subsequent twenty-five years, performance has been mixed. In some areas, Scotland's relative economic performance has improved particularly relative to an increasingly unequal UK economic model. But against key international competitors, and in areas where the parliament has levers to improve performance - such as in exports, business growth, investment, and entrepreneurship - Scotland's economy continues to lag. This is despite a raft of strategies, working groups and action plans. In reality beyond the presentation, policy agendas have remained remarkably similar to where they were back in 1999. Some exceptions exist, including most notably a greater weight upon the environment. But the lack of rigorous evaluation or review of delivery of strategy suggests that, in many ways, the economics of devolution has been more about style than substance.

This paper develops - and applies - a micro-macroeconomic modeling approach for assessing major welfare system reforms. With a growing interest in the value of bold welfare reforms in the light of persistent and widening inequalities, we demonstrate the value of a comprehensive analysis of both the (micro) impact upon the distribution of household incomes and wider (macro) impacts upon national income, unemployment and government spending. By combining microsimulation with CGE modeling, we argue that our findings demonstrate the importance of any major social welfare or broad fiscal reform being the subject of a micro-macro modeling approach. We illustrate this through an application to the introduction of a universal basic income in Scotland.

Rurality is known to be associated with a number of weaker educational outcomes, from lower attainment through to lower social mobility. This is why so much policy and practitioner focus has been directed at addressing the rurality gap in educational outcomes. In this paper, we use pupil‐level data for Scotland to contribute to two dimensions of this problem. First, we explore the relationship between socio‐economic deprivation and educational mobility across urban and rural primary schools in Scotland. This provides new insights on the issue of rural disadvantage. Second, we use our dataset to explore the socio‐economic makeup of urban and rural schools in Scotland, documenting that schools located in the highest and lowest SIMD areas are more homogeneous than those in the middle. This is important for the classification of schools in targeting educational interventions to improve social mobility.

This article estimates the effect of immigration into an occupation on the wages of natives working in other, better-paid occupations. Using Annual Population Survey data from the UK we rank occupations by the Standard Occupation Classification provided by the ONS and find that increases in the migrant/native ratio raise average wages of natives working in the next higher ranked occupation by around 0.332%. Our findings have important implications for policy and public discourse. They suggest that debates over the economic impacts of migration often ignore the potential spill-over benefits that a migrant can bring to the outcomes for native workers elsewhere in the wage distribution, particularly in lower wage occupations.

City leaders around the world are setting ambitious targets for emissions reductions. Yet the pathway to achieving this remains largely unspecified. Starting with this objective, the paper explores the merits of deploying a mission-oriented framework within the context of a 'wicked problem' by looking at a mid-sized city, Glasgow, which has a target for net zero by 2030. Focusing on themes drawn from one high-emitting sector - transport - the paper points to the real-world policy implications that stem from such a mission-oriented approach to suggest aspects of the approach that may be usefully developed further. The latter hinges on a-priori considerations given to: agency, boundaries and inter-temporality, leading to questions about the nature and scope of wickedness and argues that core issues of wickedness - uncertainty, contestation and complexity - can be amplified in local and multi-layered policy making contexts. Key policy insightsMany cities are looking to reduce emissions including establishing net zero targets and a mission-oriented framework - 'concrete targets within a challenge that act as frames and stimuli for innovation' (Mazzucato and Dibb, 2019) - has been a popular framing vehicle.Such a framework reveals challenges inherent in such a 'wicked problem' at urban scales, which are interwoven with regional and national issues, institutions and influences.Exploring these for Glasgow, which hosted COP26, we highlight the policy 'problem' and 'solution' space for mid-sized cities more generally.We highlight three dimensions that reflect the nature of the urban decarbonization challenge: agency - the responsibilities of various actors in delivering change; boundaries - the interactions between actions to reduce emissions alongside wider policy ambitions such as a 'Just Transition' and 'green jobs'; and intertemporal issues - including how ambitions for rapid change might interact with the glacial progress of structural policy change.

The academic and policy-oriented literature increasingly quantifies the wider effects of energy policy on the macroeconomy. However, the spillovers from economic policies to energy use are less frequently recognised, meaning that many policymakers who strive to improve productivity whilst simultaneously targeting emission reduction fail to consider these interactions. This paper addresses this issue by using simulation results generated by introducing an exogenous increase in labour productivity in a computable general equilibrium model calibrated with data from the United Kingdom. Theoretical analysis suggests that increasing labour productivity can have positive or negative effects on employment levels and energy use. However, the simulation results show that in the context of a developed open economy, improved labour efficiency will increase employment, a key policy objective, but simultaneously increase energy use. A key policy implication is that this work highlights the need for policy frameworks that explicitly acknowledge and quantify the interconnections between national economic policy strategies and energy policy objectives. Secondly, it shows that in practice, policies to reduce carbon emissions need to be strengthened alongside policies to improve productivity successfully implemented.

2023 marks the tercentenary of the birth of Adam Smith. A towering figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, his writings helped to establish the discipline we now refer to as Political Economy. Indeed, many of his ideas remain the foundation of economic theories still in use today. It is this ongoing relevance, and the lessons we can take from Smith's methods, that binds the papers in this Special Issue together. The Special Issue draws upon excellent contributions from renowned scholars covering a wide array of Smith's contributions to economics and political economy.

Objectives: Tax policies targeted at reducing alcohol consumption are typically understood to be asso-ciated with economic losses, including in alcohol production and trade sectors. This study sought to determine whether the overall effect of reduced alcohol consumption might be positive once im-provements in productivity associated with reduced alcohol-related consumption are considered.Study design: This study used Computable General Equilibrium economic modelling.Methods: An economic modelling framework was developed for Scotland, which considered the fiscal and economic impacts of alcohol taxation and the economy-wide impacts. Simulation of hypothetical alcohol taxes and improvements in labour productivity calibrated on losses due to absenteeism and presenteeism in Scotland in 2017.Results: The long-run impacts of a five pence increase in taxation alone produce negative economic impacts on jobs and Gross Domestic Product in Scotland (1189 jobs and 71.12 pound million). These effects are reduced by half -but remain negative -when the revenues from such policy are recycled to the economy through government spending. A small improvement in labour productivity -equivalent to 4.95% of the total productivity gap from absenteeism and presenteeism estimated for Scotland -would be sufficient to turn the economic consequence non-negative. Conclusions: The overall macroeconomic impact of policies targeted at alcohol consumption should include consideration of the potential productivity effect and that impact studies that do not include such mechanisms are likely to overstate the negative economic impacts of alcohol policies.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Royal Society for Public Health. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Financing regional government involves trade-offs between own-source taxes and grants. Improved accountability has been an argument behind calls for greater tax devolution, but this argument relies upon effective scrutiny mechanisms existing or being developed. This paper explores such issues through the lens of recent tax devolution to Scotland. Drawing on insights from senior stakeholders, we assess how scrutiny has changed in the aftermath of new powers. We conclude that, despite some improvements, progress has been limited. We develop an analytical framework to understand why, drawing out lessons for improving accountability with fiscal decentralization.

The UK levelling up agenda includes a commitment to devolution, but there has been little attempt to model the operation of possible accompanying regional tax powers.We use computable general equilibrium simulations to analyse the local impacts of regional tax cuts.These reduce production costs, thereby stimulating regional economic activity.But the financing of any subsequent deficit and the operation of the regional labour market determines the size, nature and dynamics of resulting economic outcomes.Further, the decision to target labour or capital costs has implications for a range of regional economic impacts.

The contemporary relevance of Adam Smith is evidenced by continued reference to his name. Computational analysis identifies over 700 mentions of Smith and his two famous works-The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations-in post-World War 1 House of Commons debates. We find some parliamentarians appreciate Smith's complex ideas, but most references are 'ornamental'. Charting Smith's use over the decades, this paper builds on Kirk Willis' idea that studying parliamentary debates are an ideal way to understand how, at best, policy ideas, germinate and disseminate over time, or, at worst, how 'complex ideas became slogans'.

We study the effect of exposure to older, more experienced classroom peers resulting from the widespread use of multi-grade classes in Scottish primary schools. For identification, we exploit that a class-planning algorithm quasi-randomly assigns groups of pupils to multi-grade classes. We find that school-starters benefit from exposure to second-graders in measures of numeracy and literacy. We find no evidence that these gains are driven by smaller class sizes or more parental input. While short-lived, these benefits accrue independent of socioeconomic background, to boys and girls alike, and do not come at the expense of older peers from the preceding cohort.

Understanding the factors that improve the resilience of rural communities is an important area of academic research and focus for policymakers. In this context, the COVID-19 pandemic provides an important opportunity to study the dynamics of different aspects of rural resilience in a crisis period. In this paper, we adopt a mixed methods approach to explore three issues in the context of a rural community – the West Highlands of Scotland. We frame our discussion through the lens of economic, social and environmental resilience. We 1) examine the role of businesses in supporting rural resilience within a crisis period; 2) evidence tensions that emerge across different components of rural resilience; and 3) explore, in turn, the importance of the economic, social and environmental rural context for the resilience of rural businesses. We find support that businesses can be key to supporting rural resilience, but that the resilience of rural communities is also essential to the resilience of businesses. We evidence several tensions that emerge between economic, social and environmental dimensions of resilience as it relates to business activity in rural communities. Our findings have important implications for policy with the conclusion that during times of crisis local, and community-based, solutions are crucial as is local leadership capacity.