IT the most hotly debated publication in the Scottish Government's calendar, with enough ripe cherries and rotten apples for everyone.

The Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) report is such a mixed bag of inputs, outputs and estimates it can be used to prop up any argument - and in the age of neverendums it is usually presented as a damning indictment of Scotland’s economy if it was independent, or as part of the UK, or in the EU, or after Brexit.

Many call it “fake news” but, as Nicola Sturgeon herself pointed out, it bears a Scottish Government stamp, so those who dismiss it as Unionist propaganda or completely irrelevant are misguided.

“I’m not quibbling about the essence and the reliability of these figures,” she said at a GERS briefing in Edinburgh.

However she said it did have “inherent limitations” because figures which apportion Scotland’s share of UK-wide spending in areas such as defence or debt interest are based on estimates.

She acknowledged that, as things stand, “an independent Scotland would be dealing with a deficit” but she insisted it would have the economic levers “to grow our economy and take different decisions”

She said: “I’m not going to look forward and predict what all of these decisions might be."

The Scottish Government did that once, in its White Paper on independence, and some of its forecasts proved to be wildly inaccurate.

“The figures we put forward were reliable…at the time,” she said.

“Circumstances changed. My opponents were saying it was some kind of con, and that I absolutely refute.”

In the absence of an impossibly pure forensic analysis of where money is raised and spent in the UK - or a crystal ball - GERS is a pretty fair assessment of Scotland’s fragile economy.