Scotland’s guilty Euro-secret
The current narrative of the opposition parties and media is focusing heavily on an independent Scotland's status in the European Union, and whether it would have to adopt the Euro or not. The Unionist camp is getting extremely agitated about the issue, which is slightly mystifying as it's not one which has ever featured highly on lists of Scottish voters' priorities whenever anyone's asked them.
There's probably a very simple reason for that: nobody really cares. UKIP gets next to no votes in Scotland, and the average Scot in the street, we suspect, doesn't actually give a monkey's about Scotland's Euro-status. That's not because they're insular or stupid, but because they realise it doesn't make a great deal of difference to anything.
Why? To see the answer to that, the most obvious thing to do is to look at some of the nations most easily comparable to Scotland, and that means a glance over the North Sea to our Scandinavian neighbours. Conveniently, between them the Scandinavians encompass all possible permutations of EU and Euro membership, and three of them are almost identical in size to Scotland (pop 5.2m), meaning we should be able to draw a few broad but useful parallels. So let's take a wee peek.
This is a quick and dirty comparison, so we're only going to look at a couple of basic indicators to keep things simple. The Gini coefficient is a measure of how equal or unequal a country's population is, ie how evenly its wealth is distributed (and therefore how happy the people tend to be). A low Gini score is a good thing, and the latest full world rankings can be found (in reverse order) here, so we'll put them the right way up and see who's top of the smile table.
Secondly, we'll compare GDP, by the Purchasing Power Parity method. This, very crudely speaking, is a means of adjusting raw GDP to take account of the cost of living in various countries so that the comparison is meaningful. So if a Belgian had a GDP of $50,000 a year compared to a Latvian's $25,000 but housing and bills and food and so on only cost half as much in Latvia, then both countries would have the same GDP when adjusted under PPP. (In our two-country example, $37,500.)
Still with me? Then let's check out some of an independent Scotland's peer states.
DENMARK: pop. 5.6m, in the EU, not in the Euro. Gini 3rd, GDP $36,000
NORWAY: pop. 5m, not in the EU, not in the Euro. Gini 4th, GDP $52,000
FINLAND: pop. 5.4m, in the EU, in the Euro. Gini 18th, GDP $35,000
And just for fun, the United Kingdom, of which Scotland is currently a component:
UK: pop. 65m, in the EU, not in the Euro. Gini 43rd GDP $35,000
Summary: Denmark, Norway and Finland are all far more equal countries than the UK, and have equal or higher GDP per capita. All three are plainly doing absolutely fine, whether they're in or out of the EU, and whether they're in or out of the Euro.
Conclusion: being in or out of the EU, and in or out of the Euro, makes very little detectable difference to anything at the end of the day. Whichever situation Scotland eventually ends up with, the sky isn't going to fall in.
Analysis: if the Unionist parties are counting on Europe as being the issue that will swing the referendum for them, they're probably in for an unpleasant surprise.
