Today we release our second set of public nowcast estimates.

We still do not have official estimates of GDP for Scotland for Q3 2014, but these are due very shortly (January 2015),  therefore we are only releasing estimates of GDP growth for Q4 of 2014 [1].

Headlines:

• 2014Q4 GDP growth in Scotland, at an annualised rate, is nowcast to be 2.81%, the quarterly change is nowcast to be 0.696%
• This represents a slight upward revision to the previous nowcast for Q4 2014 which produced an estimate of 2.76% (at an annualised rate). 

Even though there has been a very slight upwards revision to our nowcast for Q4 2014, these estimate both reflect a slowing down in the rate of growth in the Scottish economy through 2014[3].

This is consistent with other news this month, for instance the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) reporting a weakening in small business confidence for the second quarter in succession. In addition, the Bank of Scotland Jobs report showed a slowing in the growth of employment in Scotland towards the end of 2014.

One caveat to our results presented here: we did not have the UK Index of Services (released on 23rd December) when producing these estimates (we produced these nowcasts slightly earlier this month due to the disruption of the festive period).

For details of how these, and other “live” data on Scottish economic activity are used to construct “nowcasts”, see the Methodology page.

[1] Note as explained in the methodological paper (here),  we nowcast gross value addded (GVA) rather than gross domestic product (GDP), because this is the regional equivalent of GDP which is produced, but we refer here to GDP for intuitive ease.

[2] Bank of Scotland PMI Scotland in October 2014 are reported by Lloyds Banking Group here.

[3] Official GVA figures currently record Scottish growth in Q1 and Q2 of 2014 as 0.95% and 0.93% respectively.