A report commissioned by the Scottish Government estimates that Scotland’s international services exports may have reached £19.2 billion in 2025. The corresponding official estimate is not expected until 2027, exposing a wider problem: Scotland has several accounts of its economy, but no single current, detailed public record showing how its goods, services, onshore and offshore activity fit together.
Scotland’s international services exports may have risen to more than £19 billion in 2025, according to research published by the Scottish Government on 5 August.
The figure would represent considerable growth from the official estimate of £15.6 billion in 2023. Professional, scientific and technical services may have contributed £5.7 billion last year, followed by financial and insurance services at £3.1 billion and information and communications at £2.2 billion.
Yet none of those 2025 figures has been confirmed through Scotland’s principal official export publication.
They are “nowcasts”: statistical projections created to estimate what may have happened since the last available year. The researchers say the figures are not unquestionable predictions and should be treated as indicative estimates until the official statistics are published.
The next edition of Export Statistics Scotland, covering both 2024 and 2025, is currently scheduled for 2027. Scotland is therefore entering the second half of 2026 without a confirmed estimate of how one of its most important export sectors performed last year.
The Trade in Services Report was commissioned by the Scottish Government and produced by the Fraser of Allander Institute in partnership with Prosper and the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy. It examines financial services, professional and business services, science and research, creative industries, digital technology and energy-related work.
Its purpose was partly to assess the barriers facing Scottish businesses abroad. A secondary objective was to examine the quality and limitations of the data used to measure services trade.
The report’s authors found both commercial opportunity and statistical uncertainty.
A Large Export Sector That Is Difficult To Observe
Services accounted for approximately 41 per cent of Scotland’s international exports in 2023. They include financial advice, engineering, research, software, design, legal work, consultancy and specialist energy services that support many highly skilled and comparatively productive jobs.
But services are more difficult to count than physical goods.
A bottle of whisky or a piece of machinery can be recorded as it crosses an international border. An engineering design sent electronically to a client abroad leaves no comparable physical trail. Financial advice may be delivered online, scientific work may form part of a longer international project, and consultants may travel temporarily to complete a contract.
A Scottish company may also establish an overseas office, employ staff in another country or work through a locally based partner. Those arrangements can be necessary to meet licensing requirements, satisfy customers or qualify for public contracts.
The new report found that businesses commonly respond to foreign market barriers by changing where and how they work. Some establish subsidiaries or local offices. Others hire employees in the destination country, form partnerships or redesign their service to comply with local rules.
These decisions can preserve an international customer while making the resulting activity less visible in conventional export figures. Services supplied through an overseas commercial presence, transactions within the same corporate group and work delivered through partnerships are not always captured as a direct Scottish cross-border export.
The report warns that this affects more than the headline total. It can change where economic value is created, where employment is located and how firmly an expanding business remains anchored in Scotland.
Businesses Face Barriers That Do Not Appear At The Border
The report concludes that Scotland’s services-export challenge is increasingly one of market access rather than an absence of skill or international demand.
Businesses described difficulties involving professional qualifications, licensing, short-term visas, data rules, procurement eligibility, local-establishment requirements and duplicated compliance work. Some of these are formal legal restrictions. Others come from customers who prefer or insist upon a local office, locally recognised insurance or familiarity with domestic standards.
These barriers often do not prevent trade entirely. Instead, they increase the fixed cost of winning and delivering a contract.
A large company may be able to absorb that expense. A smaller Scottish business may decide not to enter the market, reduce its activity or move part of the work abroad. The report found that such responses can narrow international engagement even where the aggregate export figures appear resilient.
The researchers also raise a concern about the way Scotland’s services performance is interpreted. Trade with England, Wales and Northern Ireland is economically valuable, but it is commerce within the UK rather than access to an international market.
The report says present statistical frameworks have the potential to overstate Scotland’s international services competitiveness when domestic UK trade and overseas export capacity are not clearly distinguished. A business may perform strongly within the UK while still facing growing obstacles in the European Union, North America or emerging markets.
That is a policy problem as well as a statistical one. Government cannot judge which barriers require attention if it cannot clearly see where firms export, how they deliver the work or when international activity has been moved outside Scotland.
One Economy, Several Different Accounts
The delay in confirming the 2025 services figure points towards a wider question: where should the public go to see the complete account of what Scotland produces, sells and buys?
The closest answer depends on which part of the economy is being discussed.
Export Statistics Scotland is the principal official source for Scottish exports. Its latest edition estimates that Scotland exported £93.1 billion of goods and services in 2023. International exports accounted for £37.7 billion, while £55.4 billion was sold to the rest of the UK.
That publication is broad. It covers goods and services and attempts to measure commerce with both international markets and the rest of the UK.
It is also delayed, survey-dependent and incomplete in ways that are not immediately obvious from the headline number.
Export Statistics Scotland excludes oil and gas extracted from the UK Continental Shelf. It includes services supplied to the offshore industry, but not the value of the oil and gas itself. Scottish goods sold to an English business and later incorporated into an international export are ordinarily recorded only as a sale to the rest of the UK.
HM Revenue and Customs provides a second picture. Its regional trade figures are much more current and show Scotland’s international goods exports falling by 3 per cent to £24.2 billion in the year ending March 2026. Goods imports rose by 17 per cent to £25.7 billion.
Those figures cover goods crossing international borders. They exclude services, oil and gas and trade between Scotland and the rest of the UK.
They are therefore timely, but narrow.
Quarterly national accounts provide another measure. They estimate exports, imports and the trade balance for the onshore Scottish economy on a national-accounting basis, but do not provide the detailed breakdowns available in Export Statistics Scotland.
The Scottish Government also publishes separate satellite accounts for offshore or “extra-regio” activity. These cover an illustrative geographical share of oil and gas extraction in Scottish adjacent waters and can be combined with Scotland’s onshore supply-and-use tables to create what the government describes as a “Whole of Scotland” economic account.
That work is valuable and prevents offshore activity from disappearing entirely from Scotland’s economic analysis. The most recent offshore estimates extend to 2024, although the latest years are provisional and the series remains classified as official statistics in development.
But the resulting national accounts are not the simple public ledger that many people may assume exists.
They do not provide one current document reconciling detailed export destinations, international and rest-of-UK trade, goods and services, company income, ownership, profits, taxation and the proportion of economic value retained in Scotland.
The Scottish Government’s own methodology acknowledges that there is no total measure of Scottish imports directly comparable with Export Statistics Scotland. It also explains that Scotland’s position within the UK customs system requires some UK values to be apportioned statistically rather than observed directly.
Why The Figures Do Not Naturally Join Together
The fragmentation is partly structural.
Goods travelling from Scotland to England do not pass through a customs border. A business in Edinburgh selling software to a customer in London does not complete an international export declaration. HMRC therefore cannot count intra-UK commerce in the same manner as goods sent to France or the United States.
Many companies operating across Britain do not publish separate Scottish accounts showing sales, costs, profits and investment. The Scottish Government must rely on business surveys, administrative records, national accounts and statistical allocation methods to estimate Scotland’s share.
Services are more difficult again because there may be no shipment, customs form or single place of delivery. The work may be performed remotely, during temporary travel, through a multinational company or from an overseas subsidiary.
Offshore activity introduces a further boundary. Some statistics describe only the onshore economy. Others include a geographical share of offshore output. Export Statistics Scotland excludes offshore extraction, while separate satellite accounts attempt to measure it.
Each decision may be reasonable for the purpose of the individual publication. The difficulty arises when politicians, businesses and the public try to compare the resulting numbers as though they describe the same thing.
They do not.
Scotland has current information about some international goods, delayed information about wider exports, separate estimates for offshore production and national accounts constructed for another purpose. The country does not lack statistics; it lacks a single, current public account that shows how those statistics connect.
The Questions The New Report Leaves Behind
The 5 August report recommends improving Scotland’s services-trade evidence base. It calls for clearer distinctions between domestic UK services flows and international exports, along with better measures of firm-level international exposure, regulatory costs, market-entry success and the different ways services are delivered abroad.
That recommendation leads to a wider set of questions.
Why will Scotland’s official export estimate for 2025 not appear until 2027, when trade policy and business conditions can change considerably within two years?
Who is responsible for bringing together Export Statistics Scotland, HMRC goods data, quarterly national accounts and offshore satellite accounts in a form that an ordinary reader can understand?
Should Scotland publish an annual economic ledger that clearly distinguishes between onshore and offshore activity, goods and services, international and rest-of-UK commerce, recorded figures and statistical estimates?
Such a ledger could not remove every uncertainty. It could show which figures come from customs records, which come from business surveys, which are modelled and which are apportioned from UK totals.
It could also identify what remains unknown.
How much Scottish services work is now delivered through overseas subsidiaries? How many businesses have moved employment or activity abroad to gain market access? Where do the profits generated by Scottish expertise ultimately flow? How much economic value remains in Scotland once a company expands internationally?
The new report cannot answer all those questions. It shows why they must be asked.
Its central estimate is encouraging: Scotland may have generated more than £19 billion in international services exports last year. But the number has had to be modelled because the official estimate remains two years behind.
Before Scotland can judge whether its export strategy is working, it needs a clearer view of what is being exported, where the work is being done and how much of the resulting value stays here.
The report published on 5 August brings that gap into public view. It should now bring Scotland’s economic accounts — and the institutions responsible for explaining them — under closer scrutiny.
Sources
Scottish Government — Trade In Services Report
https://www.gov.scot/publications/trade-services-report/
Scottish Government — Trade In Services Report: Executive Summary And Nowcasting Results
https://www.gov.scot/publications/trade-services-report/pages/3/
Scottish Government — Trade In Services Report: Purpose Of The Research
https://www.gov.scot/publications/trade-services-report/pages/4/
Scottish Government — Trade In Services Report: Conclusion And Cross-Sector Policy Implications
https://www.gov.scot/publications/trade-services-report/pages/11/
Scottish Government — Exports Statistics Scotland 2023
https://www.gov.scot/publications/exports-statistics-scotland-2023/
Scottish Government — Export Statistics Scotland: Methodology
https://www.gov.scot/publications/export-statistics-scotland-methodology/
Scottish Government — How Exports Are Defined In Export Statistics Scotland
https://www.gov.scot/publications/export-statistics-scotland-methodology/pages/how-are-exports-defined-in-ess/
Scottish Government — Other Sources Of Scottish Trade Data
https://www.gov.scot/publications/export-statistics-scotland-methodology/pages/other-sources-of-trade-data/
Scottish Government — Inflation Adjusted HMRC Regional Trade Statistics For Scotland, Q1 2026
https://www.gov.scot/publications/inflation-adjusted-hmrc-regional-trade-statistics-for-scotland-q1-2026/
Scottish Government — Supply And Use Satellite Accounts For Extra-Regio Activities, 1998–2024
https://www.gov.scot/publications/supply-and-use-satellite-accounts-for-extra-regio-activities-1998-2024/
Scottish Government — About The Scottish National Accounts Development Programme
https://www.gov.scot/publications/about-the-scottish-national-accounts-programme-snap/
