GDP Quarterly National Accounts: 2024 Quarter 4 (October to December)

Revisions

This release includes revisions to data from Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2023 to Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2024 because of routine updates to source data, including the use of revised or late responses to business surveys and the update of estimates based on equivalent UK GDP data from the latest UK Quarterly National Accounts.

Details of revisions to GDP growth of each broad industry can be found in the standalone GDP by volume tables, while revisions to the nominal value of other key statistics are detailed in the quarterly national accounts summary tables.

Quarterly GDP growth has been revised in five of the last eight quarters, and while there are only small changes at the headline level and in the overall trend, the overall impact is that annual GDP growth has been revised up from 1.1% to 1.2% in 2024, with both upward and downward revisions to the more detailed industries underlying this.

Correction notice

This release includes a correction to some of the statistics in Table E1, Household final consumption expenditure by purpose. A processing error was discovered which led to too little expenditure being reported for Scottish residents in the rest of the world (i.e. tourist expenditure abroad) and correspondingly too much expenditure within the UK reported for some other classes. This has now been corrected for all periods back to 1998. This correction has no impact on total household expenditure which is also a component of GDP in table C1.

Measurement of GDP and consistency with results for the UK as a whole

There are some differences between the estimates for Scotland and the UK after 2019 due to the faster timescales for updates at UK level and differences between methodologies used. While the level of output in some industries and in total GDP are still broadly comparable to the UK as a whole, for many industries those comparisons should be made with caution. Specifically, whilst the UK statistics for real terms GDP growth are based on double deflated gross value added (GVA) up to 2022 (that is, the prices of both outputs and inputs are separately accounted for) and more recent periods are based on weights from 2022, the estimates for Scotland are only double deflated up to 2021 and weighted based on 2019.

On current timescales, we are likely to introduce double deflated GDP and weights for 2022 in the release for 2025 Quarter 3, following the production of Supply and Use tables for 1998-2022 (autumn 2025) based on the ONS Regional GDP statistics for the same period (April 2025) which are derived from the ONS Blue Book 2024 statistics released in October 2024. At that time our weights will still be a year behind the equivalent UK figures, but both will then be based on economic activity after the Covid-19 pandemic and should be more comparable than they have been in recent years.

Users should continue to be cautious about drawing conclusions based on comparisons between Scotland and the UK or other countries for the periods when the economy was most severely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, or comparisons of relative levels of GDP compared to the pre-pandemic level. The estimates of GDP from 2020 onwards are continuing to evolve as more data becomes available, and it is likely that these results will change again in future releases.