The dashboard shows the increasing stress on the Scottish budget over just a few years.
the Scottish Public Spending Dashboard can aid the transparency and accessibility of Scottish Government expenditure data and be used to add some much-needed detail to the debate on devolved matters of Scotland’s public finances. By producing a series of meaningfully informative data in a central interactive hub, we aim to make it easier to identify the government’s main areas of priority in practice by analysing spending by function and category over time. It is now possible to examine the degree to which outturn expenditure data backs up plans as they are announced, and to put spending on different areas in context, as well as to understand some of the drivers of spending below the headline figures.
This report highlights some key insights that can be gained from the Scottish Public Spending Dashboard, though it is not intended to be exhaustive. The functionality of the resource is such that it can be used to analyse past expenditure on particular functions of government or economic categories on a time series or cross-sectional basis, as well as allowing for spending growth rates to be altered and the respective impacts on future projections to be observed. As such, we envision this to be a resource of use to many different stakeholders.