Prof. Gordon A. Hughes

Monday, November 11 2013 at 7:00PM

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72a Waterloo Street

Prof. Gordon A. Hughes

What's the talk about?

An independent Scotland would be a classic, small, open, resouce-dependent country; however, the investment required to sustain or increase oil and gas production is considerably higher than in many other parts of the world.

Any energy-dependent economy must plan on the assumption of volaticle prices, combined with the need to maintain investment in both production and technology.

How have other resource-dependent countries responded to these problems? Couldn’t Scotland simply follow Norway’s example in setting up a Sovereign Wealth Fund? Are the predictions of the value of Scotland’s remaining oil credible, or reasonable? What would be the effect, on other industries and on Scotland as a whole, of oil and gas forming a far larger proportion of the Scottish economy? And finally, does it make sense to assume that the rest of the UK would choose to remain dependent on imported gas from Scotland?

This talk seeks to answer all these questions and more.

Professor Gordon Hughes was a senior adviser on energy and environmental policy at the World Bank until 2001. He is currently a Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh. His main fields of interest are natural resources, environmental economics, and public economics.