The industrial demand for skilled labour: a comparison of Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom

In recent years, there has been growing interest by national and regional policy-makers in the domestic availability and use of "skilled" labour. At least in part, this has been fuelled by a perception that, in an increasingly integrated global economic environment, one of the few remaining sources of local competitive advantage is differential access to human capital in the form of embodied labour skills. It is not the purpose of the present paper to consider the merits or otherwise of this general argument. Rather, the point emphasised here is that, in both Scotland and the UK generally, the focus to date has been primarily on the supply-side of the labour market, concentrating on the measurement and assessment of the skill "outputs" of schools, training courses and tertiary education institutions.