Scottish business news digest

The latest Bank of Scotland report on the Scottish labour market is a weak ray of sunshine in an otherwise chilly environment.

In brief, the survey by Markit shows a modest increase in permanent placements in January.

Donald MacRae, Chief Economist at Bank of Scotland, commented: ‘The Scottish labour market showed a small but important improvement in January. Despite slowing growth in the Eurozone and the UK, the number of people placed into permanent jobs increased after December’s decline while the number of vacancies for permanent staff was broadly unchanged from the end of last year. This latest Barometer suggests the Scottish economy is struggling to maintain growth momentum in challenging economic conditions.’

The BBC casts an eye over the figures here along with some rather more gloomy numbers from the British Retail Consortium and the Scottish Building Federation.

More encouragingly, Bill Jamieson, writing in The Scotsman, takes stock of rising equity markets in the States and wonders how long a similar upturn will last on this side of the Atlantic.

Going back to the BBC, their Scottish economics writer Douglas Fraser has written an interesting piece which looks at some of the economic questions which the independence debate has raised. Could Scotland ‘do a Norway’ and use North Sea oil to build a massive pension fund for the future?

Finally, all Vistage members appreciate that hard work is vital for building successful businesses but, at the end of the day, work is not everything. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care. She collected the dying wishes of many of her patients. At number two in the list of most common regrets was ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so hard’. A sobering thought for a Monday morning blog post but possibly one to mull over.