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.
Clarification 15/9/25 – Victor Bulmer-Thomas did not resign as Director of Chatham House in 2003 over the Iraq war. He left at the end of 2006, although he did author a paper on Blair’s foreign policy that was very critical of the invasion.
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.
Authors
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.