I’m not a great fan of economic modelling. Remember, for example, the Treasury’s infamous claim that unemployment would rise by between 500,000 and 800,000 within two years of a vote for Brexit (i.e. before we had actually left). In the event, unemployment fell in 2018 to reach the lowest level since the mid-1970s. Yet having used economic models to rubbish the case for Brexit, it becomes very difficult then to ignore forecasts which claim there would be an even bigger negative economic impact from Scottish independence. So what, in other words, will Nicola Sturgeon and other SNP politicians do about a paper just published by the LSE that claims that independence would, in the long run, reduce Scottish income per capita by between 6.3 per cent and 8.7 per cent, costing households between £2,000 and £2,800 a year?
The LSE’s modelling should, like all work of this nature, be treated with scepticism
The paper notes that at present, 61 per cent of Scottish exports go to the rest of the UK and 67 per cent of imports come from the rest of the UK.
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