ON THE face of it, the latest Scottish growth performance, for the first three months of this year, does not make very encouraging reading. After almost three years of above-trend rises in output, Scottish GDP rose by just 0.2% between January and March. That is well short of other recent quarterly increases in Scottish output (ranging from 0.4% to 0.9%) and well behind the 0.7% increase recorded in the UK economy as a whole at the start of this year. So Scotland's new finance secretary John Swinney can find some statistical backing for his claim that Scotland's growth "has not been good enough".
ON THE face of it, the latest Scottish growth performance, for the first three months of this year, does not make very encouraging reading. After almost three years of above-trend rises in output, Scottish GDP rose by just 0.2% between January and March.
