The deglobalisation of Scotland

Following ONS definitions, the official Scottish Executive figures give public sector employment in Scotland as 580,000 in 2012, having fallen slightly from its peak of 600,000 in 2009 (see Table 1). The 2012 figure represents 23.5 per cent of the total employed population. But there is good reason to suppose that these figures are a considerable underestimate given the amount of out-sourcing and publicly-funded but ‘non-state’ employment. Buchanan et al. suggest that adjusting for these boundary problems would inflate the figure for Scotland (for 2007) by almost a third, from the official figure of 580,000 (including financial institutions) to 772,000. As it happens, the official 2012 figure is the same as the official figure for 2007,  so adjusting the later figure in the same proportion would suggest again a total of 772,000, 31 per cent of the total in employment. These figures seem broadly compatible with those provided by the Centre for Cities on a city basis, which give the Dundee figure as 38 per cent and that for Glasgow as 30 per cent.

This growth of public sector employment is part of the process of de-globalisation evident in Scotland as an accompaniment to de-industrialisation.

That is from Jim Tomlinson, there is more here, via www.macrodigest.com.