In 2003, then Scotland on Sunday art critic Iain Gale wrote an impassioned article bemoaning the absence of the visual arts in Edinburgh’s array of festivals every August and so the paper launched a campaign to fill the gap.

Not that you can tell from the Edinburgh Art Festival website, but it owes its foundation the following year to the considerable efforts of Iain and the paper in bringing together interested parties and prising a start-up grant from the old Scottish Arts Council under James Boyle.

As the paper’s editor at the time, of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? We saw in a visual arts festival the chance to establish our equivalent to the Venice Biennale which attracts the international arts world in ways Edinburgh at the time was not and to an extent still doesn’t.

We positioned ourselves as champions of Scottish arts. We won the visual arts festival campaign but didn’t fare so well in supporting Scottish Opera in a spectacular fall-out with then arts minister Frank McAveety.

Under Sir Richard Armstrong, Scottish Opera earned a reputation as a truly world-class company, and association with composers like James MacMillan, Peter Maxwell Davies and Gian Carlo Menotti created an opportunity to cement Scotland’s place on the world music map all year round. But it came at a price Mr McAveety wasn’t prepared to pay so the Scottish Opera grant was slashed, the company was virtually silenced, Armstrong left and it is arguably still recovering.

The link between the two was our belief that encouraging excellence in the arts was not just good in its own right (how much praise does the Venezuelan La Systema programme receive?) but it was crucial to the economy, particularly for attracting high net-worth individuals to visit and do business here.

And this was in times of plenty, when the price of oil was on the way to its all-time high in 2008, the big two Scottish banks were slugging it out to be top dog and Britain’s biggest brewer was a company called Scottish & Newcastle. Politically, the arts were in the “nice to have” category but not seen as central to Scotland’s future prosperity.

At the Edinburgh Evening News, we campaigned for a proper entertainments arena and convention and it remains one of the capital’s biggest oversights of the past 20 years.

Now it’s a different story and the economic impact study of the Edinburgh Festivals published this week has a significance it would not have carried ten years ago. It estimates the total value to the Scottish economy is £593 million and supports some 11,600 jobs, which is no mean achievement considering most of the events only take place in July and August.

Scotland’s post-war industrial history is a story of slow decline, false dawns and dashed hopes; from uncompetitive heavy industries, the flash-in-the-pan of Silicon Glen, the disastrous ambition of the banking era, the renewables bonanza that never was and now an energy sector crippled by geopolitics which has lost around 60,000 jobs in a year.

Those who hanker after a macho past may scoff at the tourism sector but it is a pillar of future prosperity, now sustaining over 160,000 jobs, and the festivals are a lynch-pin. In a country which cannot rely on good weather it will always be as a premium destination where excellence of the experience is everything.

So when people come to the festivals, the entertainment has to be world class, the accommodation comfortable and accessible, the service top notch, the food excellent and the prices competitive, all so visitors come back, stay longer and spend more money.

It’s the same elsewhere; Celtic Connections, the Borders Book Festival, up in Orkney at the St Magnus Festival and not forgetting The Open golf, and the Six Nations Rugby. These events and more like them represent a sustainable future if they are properly nurtured. The big job now is expansion.

Events themselves should be a showcase for an approach which never switches off. Edinburgh residents might heave a sigh of relief when the last firework arches over the castle to mark the end of the festival season, and more than a few complain when the razzmatazz is cranked up again for Hogmanay, but along with higher education this is the future.

Successive reports have identified the opportunities but also warned of the danger to the festivals in an international market, so the new statistics give as much an idea of the prize on offer as what is there to be lost.