Today (1^st June) we release our latest set of nowcasts of the Scottish economy; these are our revised estimates of the growth in the current quarter (2015 Q2) and revised estimates for 2015 Q1 [1].

Headlines:

• 2015 Q2 GDP growth in Scotland, at an annualised rate, is nowcast to be 2.08%, the quarterly change is nowcast to be 0.52%
• 2015 Q1 GDP growth in Scotland, at an annualised rate, is nowcast to be 2.09%, the quarterly change is nowcast to be 0.52%

Both of these nowcasts are broadly in line with those obtained last month, and are very similar to each other suggesting that the performance of the economy in Q1 and Q2 of 2015 has been broadly similar. After three successive quarters of growth of 0.6% – between the second, third and last quarters of 2014 – our nowcasts are consistent with a slowing of the quarterly rate of growth in the first half of 2015.

This very limited change in our nowcast estimates is a reflection of the muted change in the underlying fundamentals for Scotland. The very slight increase that we find is likely driven by those factors showing some moderate increases, for instance PMI Northern Ireland, which is known to be useful in nowcasting the Scottish economy. In addition, BoS PMI Scotland (released mid-May) moved from showing a slight decline in March to slight growth in April.

This reaffirms our view from May 1st that growth is likely to continue to be modest but positive in Scotland through to the middle of 2015.

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 added (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 are reported by Lloyds Banking Group here.