IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxford/v30y2014i2p374-391..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The energy sector in Scotland’s future

Author

Listed:
  • Gordon Hughes

Abstract

The energy sector accounts for 15–20 per cent of Scottish GDP. It is highly capital-intensive and maintaining production, especially of oil and gas, will absorb a large share of business investment over the next 5–10 years. The volatility of revenues from the sector means that an independent Scotland will face much greater difficulties in macro-economic management than as part of the UK. Attempting to fix its exchange rate, either to the pound sterling or the euro, without a system of compensating fiscal transfers will put the burden of adjustment on factor mobility and incomes. Scotland could use a sovereign wealth fund as a stabilizing instrument, but it is starting from a much worse position than Norway and would need to reduce current government spending to build up the fund. The prospects for exporting gas and electricity to the rest of the UK depend upon the terms of access to markets. It seems unlikely that integrated Great Britain markets will survive in their current form. Large exports will continue but the net terms of trade will probably be less favourable to Scotland than at present.

Suggested Citation

  • Gordon Hughes, 2014. "The energy sector in Scotland’s future," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 30(2), pages 374-391.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:30:y:2014:i:2:p:374-391.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/gru012
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Giles Atkinson & Kirk Hamilton, 2016. "Asset accounting, fiscal policy and the UK’s oil and gas resources, past and future," GRI Working Papers 250, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
    2. Luis Ferney Moreno Castillo & Luis Bustos, 2020. "Las Asociaciones Público Privadas (APP) en el Sector Minero-Energético: Experiencia Nacional e Internacional," Books, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Facultad de Derecho, number 1260, October.
    3. Atkinson, Giles & Hamilton, Kirk, 2020. "Sustaining wealth: Simulating a sovereign wealth fund for the UK's oil and gas resources, past and future," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    4. Atkinson, Giles & Hamilton, Kirk, 2020. "Sustaining wealth: simulating a sovereign wealth fund for the UK’s oil and gas resources, past and future," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103564, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxford:v:30:y:2014:i:2:p:374-391.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oxrep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.