Paul Krugman reminds us today that a key argument put forward by George Osborne for the UK Coalition's austerity programme was that it would "give confidence to our economy." Krugman presents data to show that confidence has not improved at all.
What about Scotland?
The situation is almost identical to the UK as a whole as one might expect. Using the same ICAEW/Grant Thornton series that Krugman used for business confidence we can see the steady decline since 2009q3 to the end of last year.
A closer look with the inclusion of data for 2012q1 is provided here.
Business confidence appears to have picked up a little in Scotland both absolutely and relative to the UK. But we are still in negative territory.
And Scottish consumer confidence? Again much the same as in the UK as a whole. A different data set from Krugman, the Ipsos/Mori series of economic optimism is shown here
These indicators do not point to a successful policy.
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