Today's think tank reports on the budget deficit that would be faced by an independent Scotland are unlikely to be quoted by Yes Scotland in its campaign leaflets.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has handed ammunition instead to Better Together by predicting that an independent Scotland would face a budget deficit of 5.5 per cent of GDP in its first year, compared to a deficit of 2.4 per cent for the UK.

Even if the Scottish Government implemented George Osborne's planned spending cuts in full over the coming years, it could still face a deficit of 2.9 per cent of GDP in 2018-19, at a time when the UK is predicted to have a slight budget surplus, according to the IFS.

Attributing this to the spending commitments made in the Scottish Government's independence White Paper, such as on childcare and on pensions by delaying raising the pension age to 67, it states that unless there is a sudden and unexpected boost in oil revenues, which the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)predicts will decline, then the Scottish Government will likely have to cut spending or raise taxes.

The findings pose a problem for the Scottish Government. Ministers have never questioned the integrity of the IFS, after all. Instead, ministers have reacted to its analysis by highlighting Scotland's wealth and saying an independent Scotland's finances in 2016-17 will be similar to, or stronger than, both the UK and the G7 industrialised countries as a whole. They also take issue with the OBR's oil revenues forecast. Not a point-by-point refutation, then, but another set of figures more favourable to its position.

And so the debate has arrived once more at the same impasse, where two divergent forecasts are placed before voters, who are expected to - what? Undertake an accelerated PhD in economics in order to judge their relative merits? There is a risk that the more such statistics are traded over the next few weeks - and there are likely to be more reports such as these - the more confused voters will become.

Last week, First Minister Alex Salmond and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander offered wildly incompatible predictions of the financial impact on Scots of independence. It was one of the more farcical episodes in the campaign to date. There is a crying need for dependable information in this debate, so voters are not left having to decide how to vote based on emotional inclination or flipping a coin.

The analysis of a highly respected, independent body such as the IFS, of course, ought to provide such clarity. With the Yes and No camps unwilling to concede the smallest point to one another, the heavyweight authority of unaffiliated think tanks is likely to count for more with undecided voters than the biased opinions of politicians. At the same time, clearly, no economic forecast is infallible.

In a campaign in which there is no gospel truth, only judgments on the credibility of different views, the IFS's informed intervention is welcome, but voters may struggle to make sense of the cacophony of responses to it from either side of the debate.