{"id":52423,"date":"2020-08-26T07:18:03","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T06:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=52423"},"modified":"2020-08-26T07:18:03","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T06:18:03","slug":"today-is-gersday-the-day-when-the-government-expenditure-and-revenue-scotland-statement-is-published","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2020\/08\/26\/today-is-gersday-the-day-when-the-government-expenditure-and-revenue-scotland-statement-is-published\/","title":{"rendered":"Today is GERSday – the day when the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland statement is published"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last few years I have been involved in debate on the quality of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland statement. It is how I first got involved in Scottish issues. I realised that the statement was simply wrong. So I said so, with reasons attached.<\/p>\n

Today sees the publication of the latest statement. It will be wrong. I gave some reasons why in a Twitter thread this morning:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But it's worse than this. Because as I noted last year, what GERS claims is that Scotland is responsible for most of the UK's deficit:<\/p>\n

Table 1 told me most of what you need to know. It shows the net fiscal balances of Scotland and the UK as a whole since 1999. As GERS defines it:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Let me plot this, using the more extended time series data in the supporting files that the GERS web site provides. I have simply compared the two figures for Scotland with the UK as a whole net fiscal balance for each year:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I'll be candid: that makes not one iota of sense. For the record this is the proportion of population of the UK as a whole living in Scotland according to official estimates:\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What GERS is asking us to believe is that with 8.2% of the UK population Scotland created between 54% and 60% of the UK deficit last year, depending on the basis used.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bluntly, this is politically engineered nonsense, and it still astonishes me that the SNP government permit its publication when they know of these criticisms.<\/p>\n

But let's see what this morning brings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the last few years I have been involved in debate on the quality of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland statement. It is how
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-scotland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}