There are some positives to be squeezed out of latest chapter in Scotland�s official growth story. Our economy is still growing, albeit at a slowing pace. And that growth, in the short-term at least, is matching the UK as a whole.

There are some positives to be squeezed out of latest chapter in Scotland's official growth story. Our economy is still growing, albeit at a slowing pace. And that growth, in the short-term at least, is matching the UK as a whole. Analysis from the Centre for Public Policy for Regions (CPPR) even suggests Scottish growth is currently outstripping that of the EU7, the small independent states within the European Union our SNP government aspires to match by 2017.

But, on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election, ministers in the minority Holyrood administration made little attempt to exploit any upside. The latest GDP figures appeared on the government's website, for once devoid of any ministerial comment. It was only much later in the day that finance secretary John Swinney popped up on the wires, claiming the figures provided evidence of "continuing resilience" in our economy.

Might that reticence have been prompted by some really nasty returns from financial services, one of Scotland's key growth sectors in recent years, but one now in the eye of the storm raging through global financial markets? Output from the sector dropped 8.4% in the first three months of this year. Within that, banking's contribution to Scottish GDP slumped by a massive 10.9%.

Over the year to March, output from Scottish financial services contracted by 2.3%, in stark contrast to an 11.9% rise in the UK over the same period. And since then, with one leading Scottish bank announcing redundancies, the pressures have, if anything, got worse. Construction is another sector where output is shrinking in Scotland but continuing to expand in the UK as a whole. Given the continuing downbeat news from the housing front, the real estate and business services segment of our economy, which are still growing according to this data, could be next in line.

Three months ago, when the last GDP numbers were released for the final quarter of 2007, John Swinney hailed "the highest ever quarterly growth in banking". Now he is having to confront an even steeper fall over the first three months of this year. Up 4.6% one quarter, down 10.9% the next. And all of it in the immediate aftermath of the global credit crunch and the collapse of Northern Rock.

As I said in April, this bit of our growth story is deeply perplexing. It remains so. The CPPR is right to continue to question the quality of existing data sources. Yesterday it revealed that the Scottish Government and Scottish Financial Enterprise are in negotiations with the Fraser of Allander Institute to explore other data sources which might improve matters.

The other oddity in the current Scottish GDP figures, also highlighted by CPPR, concerns tourism. Other data suggests Scottish tourism has prospered over the past decade. In terms of visitor numbers, enterprises involved and employment, the hotels and catering segment of our service economy look to have grown strongly. We can all point to the hotels and restaurants around us that simply didn't exist 10 years ago.

But that growth simply fails to appear in the present GDP series. Over the past decade, output from hotels and catering has grown by 37.5% in the UK as a whole. In Scotland, the equivalent cumulative growth is a paltry 2.3%. The numbers make no sense.

Let's hope that ministerial reticence over the latest figures is, at least in part, a recognition that some of the data they are being fed is perennially suspect. It would be even better if they are beginning to acknowledge that trying to extract political capital out of the more provisional elements of the existing data is, in the end, a mug's game.

Back in April, when Q4 2007 growth for Scotland came in at 0.9%, way ahead of the UK's 0.6%, I warned the performance seemed unusually robust and likely to prove far from the whole story. At the time, ministers and their advisers were desperate to project a second successive quarter's outperformance as proof positive of the new deal the SNP was bringing to the management of the Scottish economy.

They had failed to realise that the latest quarter's GDP figure is always subject to revision. And so it has proved again. That 0.9% Scottish growth in Q4 2007 has now been revised down to 0.6%, exactly the same as the UK rate back then. The latest 0.3% quarterly growth will also be subject to ongoing revision.

On the longer view, on these latest figures, all we can say with any real measure of conviction is that, in 2006, Scottish growth was running at 2.7% against the UK's 2.9%. Last year the gap widened, Scotland growing at 2% against the UK's 3.1%. In the year to Q1 2008, against the previous four quarters, 2% plays 2.7%.

The SNP administration still has to demonstrate it can, as it has promised, narrow that gap and match UK growth by 2011. Rather than employing hype, they should turn their attention to some of those perplexing numbers in areas like financial services and tourism and ask the government statisticians why they are so volatile or so out of line with other measures.