Happy New Year to all our blog readers!

As usual for the start of the month, we’ve put our nowcasting model to work to produce some new estimates of economic growth in Scotland.

Next week, official estimates will be released by the Scottish Government of the growth in the Scottish economy in the third quarter of 2017.

In advance of this, we provide our final estimate for 2017 Q3 growth and an update for 2017 Q4 growth as follows:

• Our nowcast for GVA growth in 2017 Q3  is 0.37% which, at an annual rate, is 1.50%. This is up a little from our estimate last month.
• Our nowcast for GVA growth in 2017 Q4 is 0.35% which, at an annual rate, is 1.42%. This is essentially the same as reported last month.

With new official data released next week we will be able to evaluate the accuracy of our nowcasting model against these new data. Recall that we did some comparisons between our nowcast estimates and official data in last month’s blog.

The latest Fraser Economic Commentary, released in December 2017, provides an in-depth discussion of the outlook for the Scottish economy.