NOBODY KNOWS!

 

I've had a long & sometimes heated debate with my peers about whether an independent Wales is economically viable. Today I found a fair & balanced view of this debate here:-

https://nation.cymru/feature/draft-is-an-independent-wales-economically-viable/

Granted, the site is a news site devoted to Wales, but I still think it's published a pretty balanced review of the data. It seema that Wales could survive as an independant state, with no more financial pressure than many other world states. 

Some key points from the article:-

For as long as Welsh independence has been a serious political proposition, it has come attached to a number. Sometimes that number is £14 billion.

Sometimes it’s £21 billion. Sometimes, if you’re talking to the right economist, it drops all the way down to £2.6 billion.

Depending on who does the counting, Wales is either sitting on a fiscal black hole that makes independence a fantasy, or nursing a deficit no worse than most small European countries run every year without anyone questioning their right to exist.

Professor John Doyle of Dublin City University to re-run the numbers using accounting methods that actually reflect how two independent countries would trade with each other, rather than treating Wales as a UK region.

Doyle’s conclusion: a fiscal gap of around £2.6 billion in an independent Wales’s opening years, or 3.4% of GDP, is close to the OECD average.

It also means the two headline numbers that have defined this argument for a decade (a deficit that might be £2.6 billion, or might be £21.5 billion, depending entirely on whose model you trust) will keep getting thrown at each other largely untested, because there’s no live campaign forcing either side to prove its working in public.

Ask the average voter in Wales whether independence is affordable, and the honest answer right now isn’t yes or no. It’s:nobody has built a version of Wales’s public finances solid enough for both sides to agree on, and until someone does, or until a referendum forces the question, that isn’t likely to change.

Interesting. However, I don't think anything will change in the next 4 years. Perhaps after that, if Plaid do a good job, there may be more of a desire to test this, & look seriously at independence.