Scotland is not well served by the UK’s National Grid and the current system restricts the development of Scotland’s renewable energy potential and leads to high charges for Scottish consumers.

This response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the future of energy in Scotland calls for a publicly owned energy company to generate and deliver energy to the people of Scotland.

This report proposes a mutual, sectoral model of industrial development and rejects both ‘top down planning’ and ‘free market’ approaches.

Our approach is based on the recognition that the economy is not a force ‘external’ to society, governed by its own set of abstract rules or laws. The form an economy takes is inevitably the result of political decision-making.

Democracy must therefore extend to the economic sphere to ensure that the outcomes of these political decisions are aligned with the aspirations of the people.

The case for the Scottish Government’s proposal to half and then eliminate Air Passenger Duty with the stated goal of boosting tourism in Scotland is examined and found to be counter-productive.

Investment has become a dirty word in the era of ‘investment banking’. Investment banking is widely considered to be one of the causes of the 2008 financial crash (Varoufakis, 2015). When bankers talk about investing, they mean short-term speculation on stocks, bonds or other complex financial derivatives. That is, a form of trading (or, more accurately, gambling) that contributes nothing to the ‘real’ economy.

This report forms a response to a request for opinion on the Scottish Government’s plan to cut Air Departure Tax (formerly Air Passenger Duty) by 50% starting in 2018 and to eliminate it entirely at an unspecified future date. There is significant evidence that the economic impacts of the cut will not be as great or as beneficial as has been claimed.

Jim Cuthbert analyses the potential dangers of Scottish Government investment in Hub sub-debt, which may act as a form of ‘concealed’ borrowing from the secondary market.

Leading economist Margaret Cuthbert draws on 15 years of research on Scottish public procurement in making the case that procurement in Scotland is shrouded in secrecy and wide-ranging reforms are needed to ensure transparency and accountability.

Examining how an independent Scotland could back and defend a Scottish currency.

Commissioned by PCS, this joint work examines the economic impact of HMRC’s plans to close departments around Scotland and establish two regional offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

It is found that over 2,300 jobs could be lost due to these changes with an overall negative impact on GDP of £89 million.

The economic impact will be particularly magnified in local areas where the current HMRC departmental office employs a substantial proportion of the local workforce