Question reference: S6W-09750
- Asked by: Alexander Burnett, MSP for Aberdeenshire West, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 13 July 2022
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Current status: Answered by Ivan McKee on 29 July 2022
Question
To ask the Scottish Government how many of the 7,780 jobs created or safeguarded through inward investment in financial year 2021-22, as highlighted by Scottish Development International statistics, were (a) jobs created and (b) jobs safeguarded.
Answer
For the financial year 2021-22, Scottish Development International (SDI) and its partners recorded 3721 new jobs and 4059 safeguarded jobs. These job numbers only cover the projects or companies that were directly supported or assisted by SDI. While the Scottish Government are not able to collect data on all jobs created in Scotland as a result of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the recently published EY Attractiveness Survey 2022 estimates projected jobs created in Scotland from FDI to be around 10,000 in 2021.
In spite of the challenging economic climate of the past two years, Scotland has continued its strong performance in attracting Foreign Direct Investment. The EY recent results shows Scotland’s FDI projects (in calendar year 2021) outpaced Europe and the rest of the UK – Scottish projects were up by 14% from 2020, compared to 5.4% increase in Europe and 1.8% increase in UK. This resulted in a record number of FDI projects in Scotland, 122 projects in 2021, up from 107 projects in 2020. Scotland maintained its position as the top performing FDI region or nation of the UK, outside of London, for the 7th year running. The benefits of our approach are being felt right across the country with five of Scotland’s cities/towns in the top 20 UK locations for investment, and Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen in the top 10 UK cities.
These are fantastic results for Scotland and shows that our Inward Investment Plan is working. It also demonstrates the importance of FDI in supporting the ambitions set out in our National Strategy for Economic Transformation, by attracting high quality inward investment and technologies required in areas such as Energy Transition, Decarbonisation of Transport and Space.