Our new nowcast – the last one of this year – provides updated estimates of GDP growth in Scotland.

• Our nowcast for GVA growth in 2018 Q3 is 0.35% which, at an annual rate, is 1.42%
• Our nowcast for GVA growth in 2018 Q4 is 0.39 which, at an annual rate, is 1.57%

These represent slight downward revisions to our estimates for 2018 Q3 and Q4 released last month.

We will learn the first official estimate of growth in Q3 of 2018 on the 19th of December 2018. Our current nowcast (0.35%) suggests we will see a reduction in the growth rate relative to Q2’s official measure of growth (0.5%).

Since our November nowcast we have had new data on a number of key indicators.

While the Scottish labour market continues to record impressive headline statistics on employment (at 75% not far off its record high) and unemployment (at 3.8% at its joint-record low), wage growth is weak and barely above inflation.

Consumer confidence in November took a sharp dip from -17 in October, to -29, suggesting that consumers are increasingly pessimistic about the economic outlook. Relatedly perhaps, recent data on retail sales growth in Scotland showed growth was weak, and weaker than in the UK as a whole.

Balancing this out, and despite heightened economic policy uncertainty, Royal Bank of Scotland PMI recorded 53.4 in November, indicating solid expansion in activity, above the figure for the UK as a whole. This suggests that firms are continuing in ‘business as usual’ mode. Thus activity appears to be being maintained, but this does not appear to be being translated into improvements in wages and consumption.

With the highly uncertain political climate, our monthly nowcasts will continue to incorporate the latest indicators to produce timely estimates of growth. We intend that these can provide clear signals about the economic situation in Scotland, well in advance of official statistics.

We have updated our nowcasting model for the Scottish economy with the latest official statistics and survey data to produce new estimates of economic growth in Scotland in Q2 and Q3 of 2018.

• Our nowcast for GVA growth in 2018 Q2 is 0.33% which, at an annual rate, is 1.34%.
• Our first nowcast for GVA growth in 2018 Q3 is 0.39% which, at an annual rate, is 1.57%.

Relative to our last nowcast update our estimate for Q2 2018 has improved very slightly (up from 0.32%), but on balance the figures still suggest relatively weak growth.

This week, we’ll get revised official data for the Scottish economy when the next set of National Accounts are published. Summer is usually when more substantial revisions are put through the economic accounts – following publication of the latest Input-Output tables for Scotland in July each year – and these are likely to alter the pattern of past growth in Scotland. We’ll provide a short blog summarising these key changes.

All of this will be followed by – on the 19th of next month – the first set of official data covering the performance of the Scottish economy over the period March – June (Q2).

We’ll pick this issue up in more detail, as well as review the wider economic landscape, in the next Fraser Economic Commentary to be published in late September.

This blog reports the latest estimate of economic growth in Scotland from our nowcasting model. Unlike previous blog posts, this one only includes estimates for one quarter rather than two.

The reason for this is that the Scottish Government have now shortened the time between the end of the quarter and the release of data on that quarter.

Data for 2018 Q1 (January – March) were released on 27th June 2018, only 88 days after the end of the quarter.

While this is still a longer lag in the release of the data than that for the UK as a whole, it is much shorter than the previous publication lag for Scottish data of around 115 days.

Improvements in the timeliness of regional economic statistics are to be welcomed, and statisticians in the Scottish Government should be congratulated for their work in this area.

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