The latest manufacturing export data increase the prospect that the Scottish economy will have moved into recession in the first quarter of this year. Manufacturing exports fell by -0.6 percent but rose by 4.2 percent over the year.
The bigger picture is clear from the chart below:
Export volumes dropped by more than 13 percent in the 2008-09 recession. By the latest data point volumes are still more than 6 percent below the pre-recession peak.
The recovery effectively halted during the third quarter of last year.
There is no doubt that the slowdown in the Eurozone economies and the uncertainty played by the Eurozone crisis has played a big part in stalling the recovery. But as this post showed, the Scottish export recovery has been much weaker than in the advanced OECD economies.
That doesn't augur well for future Scottish growth prospects.
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