Seventy Years of Scotland’s National Accounts: What the Data Tells Us About Economic Change
Published: 20 February 2026
Commentary
A new paper reconstructs consistent Scottish national accounts from 1948 to 2018, highlighting the shift from manufacturing to services, the impact of North Sea oil and gas, changing labour income shares, and Scotland’s evolving performance relative to the UK and countries such as Norway to better inform economic debate.
Understanding how an economy has evolved over time is important. Not because the past provides easy answers for today’s policy debates, but because it helps anchor those debates in evidence and past experience. That was one of the motivations behind our new paper, 70 Years of Scottish National Accounts: 1948–2018, which reconstructs a consistent set of national accounts for Scotland over seven decades.
The core contribution of the paper is methodological. Historical data on Scotland’s economy exist in many places, but they are fragmented, inconsistent, and shaped by the definitions, classifications and accounting standards of their time. Over the last seventy years these standards have changed: industries have been reclassified, income concepts revised, and UK statistics themselves updated.
The official Scottish Government series begins in 1998, limiting the ability of historians to quantitatively study Scotland’s longer-run economic performance. Our approach, therefore, was to rebuild the series from the ground up.
Drawing on archival sources, official publications and academic estimates, we reconciled historical data with modern definitions, benchmarked Scottish estimates to known UK totals, and ensured consistency across income, industry and extra-regio activity (including North Sea oil and gas). Where early data were sparse, labour-market information and carefully constrained assumptions were used to fill gaps, with extensive cross-checking against previous estimates.
The result is a coherent time series covering 1948 to 2018, comprising more than 28,000 individual data points. It can be updated as new data becomes available as well, making it backwards and forwards compatible.
But the paper is not just about methods. It tells a rich story about how Scotland’s economy has changed.
In the immediate post-war period, manufacturing dominated economic activity. In 1948, manufacturing accounted for roughly a third of Scottish Gros Value Added (GVA) - a measure of overall economic output - and labour income made up around two-thirds of total GVA. Over subsequent decades that dominance steadily eroded. Heavy industry declined, productivity growth varied sharply by sector, and the structure of the economy shifted decisively toward services.
Financial and business services grew rapidly. Public administration, health and education increased their share of value added. By contrast, labour’s share of onshore GVA had fallen to 56% by 2018, reflecting broader trends seen across advanced economies.
The discovery and exploitation of North Sea oil and gas added another layer of complexity. By 1984, Mining and Quarrying – dominated by offshore oil and gas – accounted for almost 40% of total Scottish GVA.
Over the full period, including oil and gas adds an average of over 10% per year to the measured overall size of the Scottish economy (as measured by GVA).
Oil also reshaped relative performance comparisons. On an onshore basis, Scottish GVA per head has consistently trailed the UK average – falling as low as 87% of the UK level in 1961 and standing at 92% in 2018. But when offshore production is included, the picture changes: Scottish GVA per head rose to 138% of the UK average in 1984 and remained above the UK average for much of the subsequent period.
These shifts also introduced volatility. Total Scottish GVA growth has been around one-and-a-half times more volatile than onshore growth. In 1986, total GVA fell by 16%, a decline far sharper than the roughly 5% contraction experienced by the UK during the Global Financial Crisis. The long-run data show clearly how offshore production amplified economic cycles.
International comparisons also provide perspective. In the early 1960s, Scotland’s total GVA per head was broadly comparable to Norway’s. By the early 2010s, Norway’s output per head was considerably higher than both Scotland and the UK.
This perspective is important for how the work should be interpreted. One important comment – the paper is a look back in time and there is no attempt to model “what might have been”. Instead, the aim is to provide a robust historical baseline that others can use to ask their own questions.
There is inevitably only so much that can be said in a single academic paper. By publishing these new estimates, our hope is that others will explore Scotland’s economic history in greater depth – whether by focusing on particular sectors, periods of adjustment, or regional patterns within Scotland.
What the new data ultimately provide is not a verdict on the past, but a firmer foundation for understanding how Scotland’s economy has evolved – and how it continues to adapt in the face of structural change.
Read the original article on the Wiley Online Library webpage.
First published: 20 February 2026