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The blog was cheered by a brief item in The Scotsman in which the Royal Bank of Scotland announced that Scotland had a higher growth rate of start-ups than the rest of the country. Usually, Scotland is portrayed as lagging behind when it comes to entrepreneurial spirit; so it was heartening to read that the bank had supported some 11,000 new businesses over the last twelve months. Those 11,000 new businesses represent an 18% increase on the previous year. According to the report, start-up growth was up by a smaller 11% across the rest of the UK. Any warm feeling of optimism was quickly frozen by a single line in the readers’ comments column with one wag noting that eleven thousand is ‘an awful lot of
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Worried readers buy more newspapers than contented readers as they try to keep up with events. As a result, newspapers tend to focus on the gloom more readily than any rays of sunshine. Even so, today’s Scottish newspapers make particularly bleak reading. According to the headline of a double page spread in The Scotsman, things aren’t looking rosy for the economy north of the border. ‘Scotland on course for perfect double dip storm’ is the cheery headline. The first par follows up with the assertion that the feared double dip could come about because ‘the country’s economy failed to grow during the first three months of the year’.
It’s only Tuesday as I write and already this week’s economics and business news offers wildly differing predictions for Scotland’s future. At the weekend, The Ernst and Young Item Club released a report which predicted that Scotland’s economy should start to pick up in 2011 but that a weak export base and public sector cuts are likely to mean that the country will under perform the rest of the UK. On Monday, the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde did little to lighten the outlook with a survey which suggested that Scotland’s rate of business start-ups, already low compared to
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