Tradescape 2025: evidence pack

The Tradescape Evidence Pack summarises the key findings from the Tradescape 2025 project, which took place February to October 2017. Tradescape is part of Scottish Enterprise’s Future Focus programme, exploring emerging issues likely to shape Scotland’s economic development in future. It set out to identify the main drivers of trade beyond Brexit and over the next decade in order to enhance the delivery of Scotland Trade and Investment Strategy. The collaborative project was delivered by Scottish Enterprise in conjunction with Invest Northern Ireland, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Visit Scotland.

The Evidence Pack highlights the key trends and emerging developments identified by desk research. It was also informed by interviews with, and a large-scale survey of, GlobalScots, plus five workshops with businesses, trade bodies and policy makers that took place across the UK in May 2017.

The key drivers of change highlighted include: the rise of regional trade alliances, growing global value chains, rising population and consumption, increasing competition from emerging economies, ‘digital trade’, the platform economy as well as other technology-related shifts.

The research and wider engagement project is informing the delivery of Scotland’s Trade and Investment Strategy. In particular, key actions include updating the collective assessment of priority markets globally, increasing the volume and value of market insights shared with companies, stimulating a step-change in companies trading digitally and creating effective solutions to help companies quickly find trusted partners in overseas markets.