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Showing posts with label Scotland's economic future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scotland's economic future. Show all posts

Thursday 4 November 2010

The Arc of Prosperity – IMF figures, actual and projections

The Holyrood opposition parties and Unionists everywhere have more or less abandoned rational argument about Scotland’s capacity to function as an independent country. Instead, they fall back on what they think of as their best line – “What happened to Alex Salmond’s Arc of Prosperity?

Bankrupt of real arguments and bereft of new ideas, they are nonetheless determined to maintain Scots in a dependent, mendicant mindset by trying to convince them that Scotland could not survive on its own.

The IMF (The International Monetary Fund) does understand global economics and has some respect for figures, unlike The Three UK Stooges – Gray, Goldie and Scott.

I have taken some figures from their April 2010 database for Iceland, Ireland, Norway – the arc of prosperity – and the United Kingdom (IMF link) and their report for the years 2009 and projections for 2010 to 2015. It shows the GDP (gross domestic product) based on PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) and per capita GDP. The tables themselves can be viewed at (link) but I have presented them showing the top country – Norway in every year - as 100 and the others as a percentage of that, to give an instant feel for the relative positions.

                 2009   2010   2011   2012   2013   2014   2015

Norway   100      100     100     100     100     100     100

Ireland      75.1     73.7     74.1     74.5    74.9     75.4     75.8

Iceland      72.3     69.4     69.6    69.8    70.1     72.1     73.7

UK              65.9    66.2     66.8    67.5    68.2     68.8     69.3

Anyone can check these, and other figures for themselves. What this clearly demonstrates is that, in spite of  a global collapse, the three countries in the arc of prosperity are all still doing better than the pathetic performance of the UK, and are projected to do better for the next five years by the IMF.

There is another arc at work here – the Arc of Economic Nonsense talked by The Three UK Stooges, Gray, Goldie and Scott.

Norway, of course – most comparable to Scotland - is comfortably top of the heap because nobody stole their oil, and they run their own country and their own affairs.