Published:

Scottish Economy

Podcast: Key Figures – David Simpson

Episode notes

This is the first of a very special series of podcast interviews, talking to key figures from the Fraser of Allander Institute across its 50 year history. To kick things off, current director Mairi Spowage speaks to the first director and co-founder of the FAI, David Simpson, from his home in East Lothian.

Transcript

00:00:07 Mairi Spowage

Hello and welcome to the latest Fraser of Allander podcast.

00:00:12 Mairi Spowage

This podcast is one of a series that I’m doing in the run-up to celebrating our 50th anniversary with previous directors of the Institute.

00:00:22 Mairi Spowage

My name is Mari Spowage and I’m the current Institute Director.

00:00:26 Mairi Spowage

And I’m delighted to say I’m joined by David Simpson today, who was the founding director of the Fraser of Allander Institute.

00:00:34 Mairi Spowage

Welcome.

00:00:35 David Simpson

Thank you.

00:00:36 Mairi Spowage

Thank you very much for your time today.

00:00:39 Mairi Spowage

I was wondering, David, if you could say a little bit about yourself.

00:00:42 Mairi Spowage

What’s your background?

00:00:44 Mairi Spowage

How did you get into economics?

00:00:46 Mairi Spowage

And then we can talk a little bit about the origins of the Institute.

00:00:51 David Simpson

Right, well, I’ve always been interested in economics as well as politics because I felt the two things were very closely related.

00:01:01 David Simpson

So when I went to university in

00:01:05 David Simpson

In the 1950s, I went to Edinburgh and decided to study what was then called political economy.

00:01:12 David Simpson

Though the curriculum was really just the same as it would have been 10 years later when it was called economics, it was part of a kind of professional trend to where the economics profession of the time wanted to see themselves as being, quote, scientific, unquote.

00:01:33 David Simpson

So they thought if they changed their name to economic science, or as it later became economics, that would somehow make their work more appealing to people and more scientifically legitimate.

00:01:51 David Simpson

Whereas political economy had overtones of being rather hand-waving and airy-fairy and

00:02:01 David Simpson

not difficult to distinguish from sociology or that sort of stuff.

00:02:07 David Simpson

So it coincided with, of course, the growing takeover of economics by mathematics.

00:02:15 Mairi Spowage

Right.

00:02:16 David Simpson

And that was what was behind it all.

00:02:19 David Simpson

I’ve often wondered whether there is any trend backwards now, whether economics departments are changing their names back to political economy.

00:02:29 David Simpson

Or I think geo-economics is the latest buzzword.

00:02:33 Mairi Spowage

There are lots of buzzwords always in economics, I find.

00:02:36 David Simpson

Anyway, that’s how I got started.

00:02:38 Mairi Spowage

That’s great.

00:02:39 Mairi Spowage

So this year, we’re doing lots of things to celebrate the Fraser of Allander Institute, and I’m incredibly proud to lead it at the moment and in 2025.

00:02:50 Mairi Spowage

And I’m so delighted to be able to chat to you about the origins of the Institute in 1975, all those years ago.

00:02:57 Mairi Spowage

So what are your memories of how it came about that the Fraser of Allander Institute was established?

00:03:04 Mairi Spowage

What are the main things that were going on?

00:03:05 Mairi Spowage

What was the genesis of it?

00:03:07 Mairi Spowage

You know, who sort of instigated it?

00:03:10 David Simpson

Well, Jim Gilvary, who together with me really got the thing going, he and I were at that time both lecturing in economics at Sterling University.

00:03:23 David Simpson

And word reached us that

00:03:26 David Simpson

Hugh Fraser, Sir Hugh Fraser, who was then quite an important businessman in the west of Scotland and had a chain of shops which included Harrods at the time, which he had inherited from his father,

00:03:43 David Simpson

We heard that he was interested in funding the creation of a, or compilation, of an input-output table for Scotland.

00:03:53 David Simpson

Now, I have no idea where he got this idea, and strangely enough, although we had quite a bit to do with him over the next several months, we never actually asked him how he got interested.

00:04:06 David Simpson

Seems a strange omission now.

00:04:08 David Simpson

Anyway, he was.

00:04:10 David Simpson

And we took the idea, therefore, to, first of all to Stirling University, where we were employed.

00:04:19 David Simpson

and we put forward a proposal that with this funding we might set up a unit within the university to carry out the exercise because it was obviously going to be a very major exercise to compile from scratch and then put out the table.

00:04:36 David Simpson

What happened was that the court contained someone there who I think was a representative of railway union or certainly a trade union who

00:04:47 David Simpson

was deeply suspicious of all this because he thought it was an SNP plot, because Hugh Fraser had made himself briefly notorious by expressing his sympathy for the idea of independence.

00:05:00 David Simpson

Although Jim had nothing to do with the SNP, in fact, he was a fairly active Liberal.

00:05:05 David Simpson

I was also known to be an SNP.

00:05:09 David Simpson

In fact, I’d stood here in East Lothian as a candidate in 1970, and again in 74.

00:05:16 David Simpson

This guy’s opposition put the kibosh on it.

00:05:21 David Simpson

And we then went to Strathclyde through the personality of a man called Kenneth Alexander, who is not, I think, so well-remembered now, but at the time was a very big figure in Scottish life.

00:05:37 David Simpson

He was very active, not active, influential in the Labour Party.

00:05:42 David Simpson

And he became eventually chairman of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders when that was nationalized by the then Labour government.

00:05:52 David Simpson

He was also respected academically and was good with people.

00:05:58 David Simpson

And he easily persuaded the then principal of Strathclyde, a man called Sam Curran, Sir Samuel Curran, a very distinguished physicist, that

00:06:11 David Simpson

Strathclyde should accept the setting up of this, what became the Fraser of Allander Institute.

00:06:20 David Simpson

Fraser of Allander was the name of the family foundation, I think.

00:06:26 David Simpson

I’ve never actually found out where Allander is.

00:06:29 David Simpson

I think it’s a little village near

00:06:32 David Simpson

Milngavie, but I’m not entirely sure.

00:06:34 Mairi Spowage

That’s my understanding, yes.

00:06:36 Mairi Spowage

Yeah.

00:06:37 Mairi Spowage

It’s the name of the peerage that then got kind of retired.

00:06:43 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, that’s my understanding of the origins of the name.

00:06:46 David Simpson

So anyway, we persevered with the name.

00:06:49 Mairi Spowage

Was the name Hugh Fraser’s idea.

00:06:53 David Simpson

Yes, it was definitely his idea.

00:06:55 David Simpson

Oh, yes, absolutely.

00:06:57 David Simpson

And of course, he was putting up mine.

00:06:59 David Simpson

We were delighted we’d call it anything.

00:07:05 David Simpson

So it opened on the 1st of January 1975, if I’m not mistaken.

00:07:13 David Simpson

The first thing we did was to, we had to recruit people.

00:07:16 David Simpson

We had to also raise additional money, which we did from other sources like the ESRC, like the oil company Shell.

00:07:26 David Simpson

And at that time, North Sea Oil was just beginning to come ashore.

00:07:31 David Simpson

And there was a great anxiety on the part of public and private bodies in London to raise their profile in Scotland and be seen to be doing something for the Scottish public good.

00:07:46 David Simpson

So it wasn’t too difficult actually to raise money, for their money.

00:07:51 David Simpson

And we were also lucky to get some very good people to apply for the first research fellowships.

00:07:57 David Simpson

There was

00:07:58 David Simpson

David Bell, who went on later to become Professor of Economics at Stirling, and a man called Victor Bulmer Thomas, less well known now in Scotland, but after he left us, he did a sterling job in helping to build the input-output table.

00:08:16 David Simpson

He went off to become the director of Chatham House in London.

00:08:23 David Simpson

And he had gone on to a rather unsung

00:08:27 David Simpson

role that he had there was that he resigned his job when the then Blair government decided on the invasion of Iraq.

00:08:39 David Simpson

It was a very honorable thing to do, but it didn’t do him any good in terms of his career after that.

00:08:45 David Simpson

And we had one or two other people, some of whom lived nearby, funnily enough.

00:08:50 David Simpson

There’s Frank Kerwin, who lives at Huntly, and he went

00:08:55 David Simpson

After he had done a stint with us as a research fellow, he went off to join George Matheson at the SDA, as it then was, Scottish Enterprise now.

00:09:04 David Simpson

And George Matheson took him to the Royal Bank when he, Matheson, went to the Royal Bank.

00:09:11 David Simpson

And then there’s a guy called Jim Walker, whom I’m going to see on Wednesday in North Berwick.

00:09:18 David Simpson

He was, I think, a research student.

00:09:22 David Simpson

And he too eventually

00:09:24 David Simpson

He found his way to the Royal Bank, worked under Alex Salmond, and then went off to Hong Kong and made a lot of money.

00:09:32 David Simpson

And he’s just now come back and retired to North Berwick.

00:09:37 David Simpson

So we were lucky to get a really, really good body of people to start with.

00:09:42 David Simpson

And of course, it was such a big job that even our employees couldn’t possibly do it.

00:09:49 David Simpson

So we joined forces with the Scottish Council,

00:09:55 David Simpson

development and industry, which was then another, a big force in Scotland.

00:09:59 David Simpson

I think it’s rather faded from sight.

00:10:03 David Simpson

I’m not sure about that.

00:10:04 Mairi Spowage

It’s still in existence as a membership organisation, although it’s recently rebranded as Prosper after being called SCDI for, you know, for a long time and been very recognisable.

00:10:15 David Simpson

Well, anyway, it was quite influential that it had local authority links as well as business.

00:10:21 David Simpson

Also,

00:10:23 David Simpson

We got in touch with IBM, who were going to provide the computing power.

00:10:29 David Simpson

And so their contribution was in kind, not only the computing power, but they gave us the use of 1 full-time research fellow and the sort of part-time of their director.

00:10:41 David Simpson

They had established a research institute at Peterlee in County Durham.

00:10:46 Mairi Spowage

What was IBM’s sort of motivation for getting involved?

00:10:50 Mairi Spowage

It sounds like a really interesting partnership.

00:10:52 David Simpson

Just public relations, good public, it was, they wanted to be shown to have a public good, to do some public work.

00:11:02 David Simpson

And quite a lot of big companies then and now do the same sort of thing.

00:11:06 Mairi Spowage

Definitely.

00:11:06 Mairi Spowage

Really interesting.

00:11:08 David Simpson

And that worked very well.

00:11:11 David Simpson

They, I have no idea how much it cost them in terms of computing power, but we know the amount it cost in terms of their research fellowship and they

00:11:22 David Simpson

They were very, very helpful.

00:11:23 David Simpson

I couldn’t have done it without them, really.

00:11:26 David Simpson

And so together, we put together a team and set up essentially what was a data collection exercise, interviewing firms, companies.

00:11:41 David Simpson

And I should also say that on the steering committee, in addition to ourselves, IBM and Scottish Council,

00:11:50 David Simpson

The Scottish office as it then was, represented.

00:11:53 David Simpson

They didn’t want to be officially identified as a sponsor, but they had a big role because, of course, they had access to the official government statistics.

00:12:04 David Simpson

And more importantly, to people who provided them and knew where to go to get them and how to help and so on.

00:12:13 David Simpson

So that was run, the head man there was a chap called Bill McNee.

00:12:19 David Simpson

I’m not sure what became of him.

00:12:21 David Simpson

He must have retired a long time ago.

00:12:24 David Simpson

But he was really quite influential.

00:12:28 David Simpson

So this team all got together and we started off going to companies.

00:12:35 David Simpson

And most of them were actually surprisingly positive.

00:12:37 David Simpson

Although I remember one company shaking his head and saying, I feel that our company is like a tree and you want to pull us up in order to examine the roots.

00:12:48 David Simpson

And I tried to persuade him it wasn’t quite as bad as that.

00:12:52 David Simpson

But people were extremely, on the whole, very, very cooperative.

00:12:56 David Simpson

We never had any trouble.

00:12:58 David Simpson

But it was a very long exercise, and we collected the data for the year 1973, and we finally finished in, I think it was 1978, when the

00:13:13 David Simpson

book that describes, a little blue book, I hope, I think you have it at the institute.

00:13:17 Mairi Spowage

We do, yeah.

00:13:17 David Simpson

Tells you all about how it was done.

00:13:19 Mairi Spowage

Yeah.

00:13:21 David Simpson

Was published along with the tables.

00:13:22 David Simpson

And of course, it seems strange in those days, we were still publishing data in paper form.

00:13:29 Mairi Spowage

Yeah.

00:13:30 David Simpson

It was before the digital age.

00:13:34 David Simpson

Yeah.

00:13:34 David Simpson

Anyway, so it happened.

00:13:36 David Simpson

And then he was actually building iy

00:13:40 David Simpson

the Scottish office guy who had the idea of this wall chart, which the idea was that he thought there should be one in every school so that people could, students, pupils could look at it and see and get an understanding of how the economy worked.

00:13:57 David Simpson

And we all thought that was a great idea.

00:13:59 David Simpson

I don’t think enough copies were ever made to send to every school.

00:14:03 David Simpson

I would like to think that it happened, but I have a horrible feeling it didn’t happen.

00:14:08 David Simpson

So there’s just a few odds and ends of copies lying about.

00:14:12 Mairi Spowage

Yes, and David arranged for one to recently get framed a few years ago, and now it’s pride of place in the Institute.

00:14:24 David Simpson

Yes.

00:14:25 Mairi Spowage

We still do a lot on input-output tables.

00:14:28 Mairi Spowage

It’s the heart of a lot of our work.

00:14:30 David Simpson

Oh, that’s great.

00:14:31 David Simpson

I’m glad to know.

00:14:31 David Simpson

Well, do you want to tell me now or tell me later, maybe?

00:14:35 Mairi Spowage

It’s just that.

00:14:36 Mairi Spowage

we still do a lot of work with it.

00:14:38 Mairi Spowage

We have a lot of expertise in it and our expertise in the input-output and then, the way that you use that to develop into CGE modelling and so on.

00:14:47 Mairi Spowage

It’s very much seen as our expertise across the UK, not just in Scotland.

00:14:51 Mairi Spowage

We do a lot of work on it with various bodies who are interested, not just in Scotland, but.

00:14:57 Mairi Spowage

It really is at the heart of.

00:15:00 Mairi Spowage

We recognise, I think.

00:15:02 Mairi Spowage

Maybe some others don’t sometimes in the economics profession that.

00:15:06 Mairi Spowage

Unless you really understand the economy that you’re, opining about and modelling for it in terms of the data and what it tells you about the linkages in the economy, it’s very hard to do sensible modelling.

00:15:18 Mairi Spowage

So, you know, it’s at the heart of our kind of applied economic research.

00:15:22 Mairi Spowage

So, for me, as someone who has built input-output tables and has used them extensively, having that on the wall as a kind of, you know, reminder of where we come from.

00:15:35 David Simpson

I mean, it must seem like 1973 must seem like a dim and distant past.

00:15:41 Mairi Spowage

Well, indeed.

00:15:44 Mairi Spowage

Well, I will say, David, that I wasn’t born then.

00:15:47 David Simpson

I was about to say.

00:15:52 Mairi Spowage

Quite, exactly.

00:15:53 Mairi Spowage

So, obviously, there’s the creation of the tables, which sounded like both.

00:15:56 Mairi Spowage

It was kind of a labour of love and also a long time, you know,

00:16:02 Mairi Spowage

What else was the institute doing in those early days?

00:16:06 Mairi Spowage

And also what other kind of benefits did the creation of the table bring?

00:16:10 David Simpson

To take the first question first, we also tried to develop a short-term analysis and forecasting activity, I suppose, thinking along the lines of an IESR, a sort of macro.

00:16:29 David Simpson

And that was what David Bell was hired for, and he proved to be very good at that.

00:16:37 David Simpson

We also published, the results of the macro were published mainly in a quarterly publication that we brought out called the Quarterly Economic Commentary, for which we sought separate funding from

00:16:59 David Simpson

individual businesses, we ask them to sponsor it.

00:17:04 David Simpson

And that, I have no idea, is that still going?

00:17:06 Mairi Spowage

It is still going, you’ll be pleased to know.

00:17:10 Mairi Spowage

I know, and lots of different businesses have sponsored it and supported it over the years.

00:17:14 Mairi Spowage

The most recent, since 2016, we’ve partnered with Deloitte on it, for example.

00:17:21 Mairi Spowage

And it still has a lot of the same features, what’s going on in the economy, regular forecasts of the Scottish economy, quite a lot of commentary on fiscal issues as well, because it’s a big part of our specialty.

00:17:36 Mairi Spowage

But you’ll be glad to know, we’ve got the first, we’ve obviously got paper copies of the very first one.

00:17:41 Mairi Spowage

Really?

00:17:42 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, from July 1975.

00:17:45 Mairi Spowage

And what we did in the most recent commentary is, given it was July

00:17:49 Mairi Spowage

2025 as we used the same cover as the very first one just to get a bit retro and so yes it’s still going 50 years later and it’s a kind of

00:18:01 Mairi Spowage

It mainstay, cornerstone of our kind of output on a regular basis where we’re saying this is what’s going on in the economy and here’s some interesting features of various economic data and so on.

00:18:11 David Simpson

And you find that there is sufficient interest in Scotland in that sort of information still.

00:18:17 Mairi Spowage

Absolutely, and you know, a lot of it is because of the reputation of the institute, of course, which comes from its origins and how it’s operated over the last 50 years.

00:18:29 Mairi Spowage

But people are waiting to see what we’re going to say about the economy, and what our view is on what’s going on.

00:18:37 Mairi Spowage

That’s very good.

00:18:37 Mairi Spowage

So still going strong.

00:18:39 Mairi Spowage

Coming back to the IO model and then the table, what

00:18:45 Mairi Spowage

What benefits, apart from the beautiful wall chart, which I appreciate, what benefits do you think that brought?

00:18:51 Mairi Spowage

Because to me, it sort of cemented this as something that must be done for Scotland, if you see what I mean.

00:18:56 Mairi Spowage

Because ever since then, Scotland has a kind of pedigree of continuing to produce this sort of analysis of the Scottish economy.

00:19:03 David Simpson

Well, I think probably the first benefit was that it was used by the Scottish office

00:19:14 David Simpson

as a kind of support for their regional accounting system.

00:19:20 David Simpson

So I was told, I mean, I wasn’t ever involved in that myself, but I believe that was the case.

00:19:27 David Simpson

And then quite quickly, they began, the Scottish office began to produce periodic input-output tables

00:19:35 David Simpson

For Scotland, and I don’t think they were, you will know much more about that than I do, but I don’t think they were initially survey-based, but they were certainly updated and they were…

00:19:50 David Simpson

based partly, I imagine, on UK IO data and partly on the input-output table that we had devised.

00:19:59 David Simpson

So there was the statistical use.

00:20:01 David Simpson

And needless to say, we were really thrilled when we heard that this was happening because we hadn’t a very clear idea when we set out what the uses might be.

00:20:11 David Simpson

We just felt that

00:20:14 David Simpson

it ought to be done, we had the ability to do it.

00:20:17 David Simpson

And when somebody came along and said, we’ve got the money to do it, well, that was the obvious thing.

00:20:23 David Simpson

And then, of course, Peter McGregor and Kim Swales and others, they will tell you about the way they used the data for, I imagine they used the data that came later than obviously the 73 data.

00:20:41 David Simpson

But

00:20:42 David Simpson

the data which was generated as a result of the 73 table, they were able to use for their computable general equilibrium models, which they can tell you all about.

00:20:57 David Simpson

I’m not sure beyond that what other uses there might have been, whether there were any academic uses, I don’t know.

00:21:06 David Simpson

Which reminds me of a very funny little thing you may not know about, which is that way back

00:21:12 David Simpson

Long before the 73 table, back in the 60s, two people called Christopher Blake and Stuart McDougall, I think it was.

00:21:25 David Simpson

I don’t know, not quite Dougall.

00:21:26 David Simpson

Both were lecturers in St Andrews in economics.

00:21:31 David Simpson

And they decided off their own bat

00:21:34 David Simpson

to build an Input Output table of the town of St Andrews.

00:21:38 Mairi Spowage

The town of St Andrews!

00:21:39 David Simpson

Yes, and it was published in the Scottish Journal.

00:21:41 David Simpson

And the reason they did it, they built the table to solve, resolve the age-old question, which people in St Andrews have been talking about for maybe generations.

00:21:55 David Simpson

Which is it that generates the most benefit for St Andrews?

00:22:00 David Simpson

Is it the university or is it the tourism?

00:22:03 David Simpson

Tourism being mainly, of course, golf.

00:22:07 David Simpson

And so they built the table and they came to the conclusion.

00:22:12 David Simpson

I can’t remember.

00:22:13 David Simpson

I can’t remember what the answer was.

00:22:15 Mairi Spowage

As a former student, undergraduate student at St Andrews, I imagine it was the university.

00:22:23 David Simpson

Yeah, I would think so.

00:22:24 Mairi Spowage

In terms of the money, I’m sure I spent during the semesters anyway.

00:22:28 Mairi Spowage

But very different at different points in the year, which is how St Andrews feels, I suppose, as well.

00:22:33 David Simpson

But it was a very small, it only had about 5 sectors, but they didn’t need more than that.

00:22:37 David Simpson

And they collected all the data themselves, or maybe invented somewhere there wasn’t, where they couldn’t get it.

00:22:45 David Simpson

And it was very neat.

00:22:46 David Simpson

It was, as I say,

00:22:47 David Simpson

It appeared in one of the issues of the Scottish Journal in the 60s, I think.

00:22:50 Mairi Spowage

In the 60s.

00:22:51 David Simpson

I’m pretty sure it could be even as far back as the 50s.

00:22:55 David Simpson

No, I think it must have been 60s.

00:22:58 Mairi Spowage

Well, I’m going to go and dig that out.

00:22:59 Mairi Spowage

That sounds amazing.

00:23:00 David Simpson

It was a good example of where an input output table was built in order to solve a practical question.

00:23:09 David Simpson

Answer a practical question.

00:23:11 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, absolutely.

00:23:12 Mairi Spowage

But I mean, I really do think that the

00:23:17 Mairi Spowage

the table that was built for 73 sort of has a line to now and the expertise that the Scottish Government, for example, has in developing and publishing input-output tables.

00:23:31 Mairi Spowage

I mean, I probably would say that and declare an interest.

00:23:33 Mairi Spowage

I used to be head of National Accounts of the Scottish Government.

00:23:36 Mairi Spowage

I was in charge of the teams that produced these things for a few years, so it is close to my heart.

00:23:43 Mairi Spowage

But

00:23:46 Mairi Spowage

Scotland was the only part of the UK for a long time that was producing supply and use tables and input-output tables on a regular basis.

00:23:53 Mairi Spowage

So we understood the structure of the Scottish economy, how the sectors interlinked, and we’re able to do, you know, proper economic modelling, which, you know, then could lead to things like not just CGE models of the Scottish economy under.

00:24:07 Mairi Spowage

So we had dynamic modelling that was able to be done, but also

00:24:13 Mairi Spowage

it led to other things like us being able to publish things like quarterly national accounts and really understand, regularly what’s going on in the Scottish economy to be able to build other sorts of structural economic models for Scotland.

00:24:26 Mairi Spowage

So that these economic accounts are at the heart of it.

00:24:29 Mairi Spowage

And I think that line goes all the way back to

00:24:32 Mairi Spowage

this data that was produced in the late 70s by the FAI, how that was taken up by the Scotland office at the time, and people like Sandy Stewart and, you know, those sorts of folk who were working in government to really cement this being done on a regular basis.

00:24:46 Mairi Spowage

And then from kind of, you know, the late 90s onwards, these being produced on a regular basis.

00:24:53 David Simpson

I presume that’s still going on.

00:24:54 Mairi Spowage

It’s still going on.

00:24:55 Mairi Spowage

And for me, you know, every year they produce a new IO table.

00:25:01 Mairi Spowage

A supply use table.

00:25:02 Mairi Spowage

They produce a series that’s consistent all the way back in time, which the ONS don’t do for the UK.

00:25:08 Mairi Spowage

You know, they produce IOs every year right back to 1998.

00:25:15 Mairi Spowage

And, you know, so the resource that they publish and produce for researchers like us is incredible.

00:25:21 David Simpson

And how is that?

00:25:22 David Simpson

I mean, I’m astonished that the government would be willing to allocate the resources to do that.

00:25:30 David Simpson

But then there’s never any criticism of saying, is this really necessary?

00:25:36 Mairi Spowage

No, I mean, after 2007, when the SNP took power, there was even a further investment, which was driven by…

00:25:44 Mairi Spowage

Sandy Stewart, who was the head of National Accounts at that point, to invest further to build on the IO tables, which were well established by then, and regular quarterly GDP, which to a certain extent flows from the fact you have the structure to be able to, you know, to do these short-term indicators, you know, to invest in the Scottish National Accounts Project, which then led to the Quarterly National Accounts Scotland.

00:26:10 Mairi Spowage

And these

00:26:12 Mairi Spowage

These different resources are at the heart of their being able to be something like the Scottish Fiscal Commission, who then models a Scottish economy and forecasts it.

00:26:22 Mairi Spowage

Without these building blocks, you can’t do any of that properly.

00:26:26 Mairi Spowage

And so over time, NISRA for Northern Ireland have developed IO tables and supply use tables.

00:26:35 Mairi Spowage

Very much with the support and help of the Scottish Government team.

00:26:40 Mairi Spowage

Now Wales.

00:26:41 Mairi Spowage

are doing it.

00:26:42 Mairi Spowage

The Welsh government are doing it.

00:26:44 Mairi Spowage

And indeed, the ONS in partnership with the OECD and the Department for Business and Trade are looking about whether, you know, one could produce tables that were consistent for the 12 regions of the UK, including the three devolved nations.

00:26:56 Mairi Spowage

You know, so like the value of these is demonstrated, you know, regularly and, you know, it’s called for regularly that this should be available for all parts of the UK, but Scotland is still so far ahead.

00:27:07 Mairi Spowage

And I think that’s because, the thread goes all the way back to that being done in the late 70s, which allowed the Scottish Government to invest in it.

00:27:14 Mairi Spowage

And almost by the late 90s, it was so established that this would be done on a regular basis for Scotland that, people couldn’t do without it.

00:27:22 David Simpson

That’s amazing.

00:27:23 David Simpson

Well, I’m so pleased to hear that.

00:27:26 David Simpson

I had only the vaguest idea that sort of thing was going on.

00:27:29 Mairi Spowage

You probably know, David, there’s an enthusiastic IO community out there.

00:27:34 David Simpson

Yeah, because there was…

00:27:36 David Simpson

There.

00:27:37 David Simpson

Was an IO conference in Glasgow about three, four, five years ago, I don’t remember.

00:27:42 Mairi Spowage

So I think it was in 2019, 2018 or 2019.

00:27:46 Mairi Spowage

So it was it was before COVID.

00:27:47 Mairi Spowage

It was before COVID.

00:27:49 David Simpson

Yeah.

00:27:50 Mairi Spowage

And yes, so that brought together the people across the world who are…

00:27:56 Mairi Spowage

IO aficionados and enthusiasts.

00:27:59 David Simpson

A lot of Chinese, I noticed.

00:28:00 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, yes, and it was a very entertaining conference.

00:28:05 Mairi Spowage

It was, it was.

00:28:07 David Simpson

And I’ve lost touch, sadly, was the driving force behind it was a job from, I think he worked for the Central Statistics Office.

00:28:21 Mairi Spowage

Sanjeev Mahajan.

00:28:25 Mairi Spowage

Yes, I know Sanjeev very well, and I still see him on.

00:28:27 David Simpson

Is he still going?

00:28:28 Mairi Spowage

He’s still going, and he is still, you know, the expert in IO internationally.

00:28:34 Mairi Spowage

He had been, he has been for many years working on the next SNA, the system of national accounts 2025, and you know, always putting IO, you know, the supply use at the heart of national accounts.

00:28:49 Mairi Spowage

So,

00:28:50 Mairi Spowage

So, yes, he’s still very much involved.

00:28:51 Mairi Spowage

He’s still working for the Office for National Statistics

00:28:53 David Simpson

If you are in touch with him, please tell him I’d like to send my best wishes.

00:28:58 Mairi Spowage

I will, absolutely.

00:28:59 Mairi Spowage

Happy to put you in touch with him again, because he thinks very highly of you, David.

00:29:02 Mairi Spowage

I know that.

00:29:04 Mairi Spowage

So, yes, and he loves, loves the 73 table.

00:29:08 David Simpson

He loves what?

00:29:09 Mairi Spowage

He loves the 73 table.

00:29:10 David Simpson

All right, yes, I remember being, he insisted at this conference on having a picture with

00:29:16 David Simpson

Him and me standing by this time.

00:29:18 Mairi Spowage

I know, because we had to bring it down the hill.

00:29:21 Mairi Spowage

The hill, the North Portland Street hill.

00:29:26 Mairi Spowage

A few of us carried it down.

00:29:27 Mairi Spowage

I say us, it was a couple of my colleagues who have bigger muscles than me.

00:29:35 Mairi Spowage

So,

00:29:38 Mairi Spowage

You moved from the institute into the department at some point, didn’t you?

00:29:43 Mairi Spowage

So, remind me, who did you hand over to and what date was that?

00:29:46 Mairi Spowage

Jim McGilbury, right?

00:29:48 David Simpson

Jim, he sadly died quite at the age of 58.

00:29:54 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, very early, yeah.

00:29:55 David Simpson

But at that time, that was, we’re talking long before that, or sometime before that, he gave another sort of fill up to the institute because he

00:30:09 David Simpson

essentially made the contact with a consultancy company based in London, Arab, in fact, I think Palestinian-based consultancy company called Dara Handasar, which means the House of Engineering.

00:30:24 David Simpson

They were engineers who did contracts in Arab countries funded usually by UNDP and so on.

00:30:34 David Simpson

And they’ve increasingly found that as they were doing these projects, they were asked to do not just the mechanical parts of it, but also to make economic assessments of the costs and the benefits of the project.

00:30:47 David Simpson

So they found Jim.

00:30:51 David Simpson

And as a result of that, Jim, in fact, spent a couple of years on leave from Strathclyde, working full-time for them in London.

00:31:01 David Simpson

But

00:31:02 David Simpson

most of the time he worked part-time, but the important thing was he would, Jim would pull in people from the Fraser Institute, sometimes from the department, and take them to work on these projects, which are always temporary things, say maybe a year, six months.

00:31:23 David Simpson

And this was a tremendous morale booster because people not only got paid for doing this, but they also got

00:31:32 David Simpson

all expenses travel and living in these countries for six months.

00:31:38 David Simpson

Morocco, Jordan, Oman, and so on.

00:31:41 Mairi Spowage

Oh, marvellous.

00:31:42 David Simpson

Great fun.

00:31:44 David Simpson

And so that really, really boosted the institute at that time.

00:31:49 David Simpson

And then Jim, when he finally stepped down, he handed over to a chap called Ian McNichol.

00:31:58 David Simpson

Do you know if you ever met Ian?

00:32:00 Mairi Spowage

No, I haven’t met Ian.

00:32:01 David Simpson

He did an input output

00:32:02 David Simpson

Before he joined the, or maybe while he was there, Ian built an input open table for Shetland, which was funded by, I think, by the Shetland Islands Council, or whatever it calls itself.

00:32:17 David Simpson

And that was, so he had a pretty good grasp, not only of input output in this sort of analytical sense, but also in having, in putting the data together and also seeing how it was

00:32:29 David Simpson

Actually, based on the ground.

00:32:31 Mairi Spowage

That’s really interesting, actually, because the Shetland kind of IO pedigree goes on, he’ll be pleased to know.

00:32:38 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, we’ve got lots of the documentation from the various iterations, and there has been quite a few over the years of working with Shetland Islands Council who are

00:32:50 Mairi Spowage

IO enthusiasts like ourselves that we did here, which has lasted, and the most recent one was for 2017 that we did with Shetland Islands Council.

00:32:59 Mairi Spowage

So, yeah, you can see, obviously, their interest and their very, unique economy that they have, and but it’s fantastic.

00:33:11 Mairi Spowage

So, it continues.

00:33:13 David Simpson

I think Ian would be, he’s living in retirement in Spain, I believe.

00:33:18 David Simpson

And I haven’t any direct contact with him, but I hear that that’s where he is.

00:33:24 David Simpson

But he would be delighted to know that there was still continuing relationships between you and Shetland Council and through input output.

00:33:33 Mairi Spowage

Yeah.

00:33:35 David Simpson

And then I think he was probably succeeded by Peter McGregor, is that right?

00:33:40 David Simpson

Or was there someone in between?

00:33:41 Mairi Spowage

Some of the dates are, I’m still working out through discussion.

00:33:46 David Simpson

Yes.

00:33:48 Mairi Spowage

Because Peter was director a number of times and there was…

00:33:51 David Simpson

Oh, was he?

00:33:51 David Simpson

Yeah, that’s right.

00:33:53 David Simpson

Yeah, I guess I really, because I left Strathclyde in, I moved from the Institute to the department about 1980, I think, and I was there for eight years until I moved to Standard Life.

00:34:11 Mairi Spowage

Right.

00:34:12 David Simpson

And so once I moved to start with them, I really lost touch with what was going on, other than just friendships.

00:34:21 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, of course.

00:34:22 Mairi Spowage

Yes, and I see you mentioned Isabel.

00:34:26 David Simpson

Yes, Isabel.

00:34:27 David Simpson

Now, yes, Isabel.

00:34:28 David Simpson

Now, when the…

00:34:31 David Simpson

conference took place in Glasgow in 2017, you said.

00:34:35 Mairi Spowage

I think 2018.

00:34:36 David Simpson

2018, yeah.

00:34:37 David Simpson

Isabel turned up, showed up.

00:34:39 Mairi Spowage

Yes.

00:34:40 David Simpson

And that was wonderful to see her again.

00:34:42 Mairi Spowage

She was still working there when I joined in 2018, and she retired, I think, just around COVID time.

00:34:50 David Simpson

She was a link with the, although she wasn’t quite the very first, the very first secretary was someone called Shelagh Blackhall, sadly, died two, three years ago.

00:35:00 David Simpson

who was Jim and my secretary at Sterling University

00:35:04 Mairi Spowage

Oh, so she came over with you, did she?

00:35:05 Mairi Spowage

Did she come over with you?

00:35:07 David Simpson

She came over with us in 1975, yeah.

00:35:10 David Simpson

And she was the first secretary.

00:35:12 David Simpson

So Shelagh is spelled, by the way, the Irish way, S-H-E-L-A-G-H.

00:35:20 David Simpson

And she, and then maybe after a year or two, I’m not sure how long, Isabel joined us.

00:35:28 David Simpson

And then she was there and she retired and Isabel carried on.

00:35:33 Mairi Spowage

Yep, until, I think, I’m pretty sure it was 2020 she retired.

00:35:36 David Simpson

I wouldn’t be surprised.

00:35:37 David Simpson

So yes, she was there.

00:35:39 Mairi Spowage

Another link to the very start.

00:35:41 David Simpson

Wonderful that the continuity’s there.

00:35:44 Mairi Spowage

Yes, absolutely.

00:35:45 Mairi Spowage

And.

00:35:48 David Simpson

What year did you take over?

00:35:49 Mairi Spowage

So I moved over on secondment in 2018 and then came over in 2019 permanently as a deputy director.

00:35:56 David Simpson

2020.

00:35:56 David Simpson

So, and then you were there when you arrived?

00:35:59 Mairi Spowage

Isabel was there when I arrived, and then I took over as director in 2021.

00:36:03 Mairi Spowage

So, yeah, so I’ve been the director for four years.

00:36:09 Mairi Spowage

So, you know, you’ve talked about the kind of origins of the institute and

00:36:14 Mairi Spowage

the genesis of it and what you did in the early days.

00:36:17 Mairi Spowage

And what are your reflections now with the kind of the economy now compared to that sort of time?

00:36:25 Mairi Spowage

And, I guess, any reflections you have on, the need for, I suppose, independent economic voices and the kind of chaos we have at the moment.

00:36:35 David Simpson

I know, you were kind enough to say in one of your e-mail exchanges what

00:36:40 David Simpson

ideas I might have about what the Institute might do in the future.

00:36:45 David Simpson

And I really wouldn’t, I do emphasize how out of touch I am, not just with the Scottish economy, but the world in general.

00:36:55 David Simpson

But I just don’t, the world has changed so much, and the rate of change is accelerating.

00:37:05 David Simpson

I mean, what’s going on politically, to say nothing of the

00:37:10 David Simpson

economic impact of that is just, a few years ago would have not been believed, not believed the way Trump is behaving.

00:37:20 David Simpson

Nobody, if you’d said five years ago that an American president was going to do these things, nobody would have believed you.

00:37:27 David Simpson

Maybe 10 years ago, perhaps.

00:37:29 Mairi Spowage

Yeah, probably 10.

00:37:31 Mairi Spowage

Okay, well, thank you so much, David.

00:37:33 Mairi Spowage

See where, what you started, see where it has come to you.

00:37:39 Mairi Spowage

As I said at the beginning, this is one in our series of podcasts with previous FAI directors.

00:37:46 Mairi Spowage

We felt this one was so interesting because it was with the founding director of the Institute.

00:37:51 Mairi Spowage

And, you know, from David to me, I suppose you can see the 50 years of the Institute and where it started and where it’s come to.

00:37:59 Mairi Spowage

So I hope you find it interesting and we’ll see you again soon for another Fraser of Allander podcast.

 

Picture of Mairi Spowage, director of the Fraser of Allander Institute

Mairi is the Director of the Fraser of Allander Institute. Previously, she was the Deputy Chief Executive of the Scottish Fiscal Commission and the Head of National Accounts at the Scottish Government and has over a decade of experience working in different areas of statistics and analysis.