GDP Quarterly National Accounts: 2025 Quarter 3 (July to September)

Revisions

Statistics in this release have been open for revisions in all periods back to 1998 following the release of the latest annual supply and use tables for 1998-2022 in December. Estimates for all components of GDP by output, income and expenditure approaches are now benchmarked to the values in the tables for those years. GDP chainlinked volume measures now have a latest weight year of 2022, moving on from pre-pandemic 2019 weights for the first time, and are also now presented with reference year 2022 in the published tables.

Figure R1 shows a comparison of the latest estimate of annual GDP in volume terms to the previous published estimate. Reference year 2019=100 is used in this chart to most clearly illustrate the revisions to GDP growth in recent years.

Figure R1: GDP in volume terms has been revised down in 2022, with no significant revisions to earlier long-term trends

GDP chained volume measure, Scotland onshore, 2019=100

For GDP in volume terms, the largest revision is to the year 2022 itself, where annual GDP growth has been revised down from 5.0% to 4.0%. This partly reflects a downward revision to the current price value of GDP, as well as updates to the deflation process in this year. This is due to estimates of real terms gross value added (GVA) for 2022 being double deflated for the first time (i.e. where industry outputs and inputs are separately adjusted for inflation in the calculation). In 2022, the downward revision to growth in real terms reflects factors including the ongoing impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic and the sharp increase in energy prices and the effects on input costs. The industries which made the largest contributions to the downward revision were retail and wholesale, accommodation and food services, and electricity and gas supply, with the largest offsetting upward revisions in professional, scientific and technical services.  

In earlier year there are some revisions to annual and quarterly growth due to re-estimation of deflated outputs and inputs constrained to the latest supply and use tables. There is no significant change to the long-term trend, with a small upward revision to average growth prior to the financial crisis in 2008-9 and a small downward revision in average growth after this, as shown in Table R1 below.

Table R1: Revisions to longer-term average annual GDP growth rates

For periods from 2023 onwards, GDP estimates are still provisionally based on deflated output only. Growth in these latest years has been revised up slightly, with annual growth increasing from the previous estimate of 0.5% to 0.7% in 2023, and from 0.9% to 1.1% in 2024.

The revisions to these years partly reflects the reweighting of industry series from 2019 to 2022, as well as adjustments to constrain the quarterly data series to the annual data up to 2022. In particular, the lower levels of output now estimated for 2022 are followed by a faster recovery period at the start of 2023. In addition to these structural updates, estimates for more recent quarters from 2023 onwards have also been subject to the usual routine quarterly updates 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. The changes to quarter on quarter growth are shown below in Figure R2.

Figure R2: There are more upward than downward revisions to quarterly GDP growth rates since the start of 2023

Quarterly growth in GDP chained volume measure, Scotland onshore

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

In current prices, all components of GDP have been updated and are consistent with the supply and use tables for the years 1998-2022, with estimates since 2023 based on a range of short-term data on the output, income and expenditure components along with provisional balancing and alignment adjustments. On the income approach to GDP, compensation of employment and gross operating surplus have both been revised down in 2022 and more recent years, partly offset by upwardly revised taxes less subsidies on production and products.

On the expenditure approach to GDP, in 2022 and the years since, there have been downward revisions to household final consumption expenditure, government final consumption expenditure, and gross fixed capital formation. These have been partly offset by upward revisions to net trade in 2022 and 2023. Estimates of exports have been revised up, including data from Exports Statistics Scotland for 2022 and 2023, while estimates of imports have been revised up by less, resulting in small improvements to the trade balance.  

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

As discussed in previous releases there can be differences between the estimates of GDP for Scotland and the UK as a whole due to the faster timescales for updates at UK level and differences between methodologies used. At the present time, UK statistics for real terms GDP growth are based on double deflated GVA and weights up to 2023 (that is, the prices of both outputs and inputs are separately accounted for), while the estimates for Scotland are double deflated up to 2022, with estimates for 2023 based on deflated output only. These differences are unavoidable, and while we aim for coherence at the level of total GDP, users should be conscious of the potential for differences when making comparisons of detailed components in recent years.

Users should also 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 due to the higher level of uncertainty during these periods and differences in data sources and methods used.