ABSTRACT
The insured population of Scotland increased by 12 per cent between 1923 and 1937, as compared with 22 per cent for Great Britain, and the number of insured workers actually in employment increased by 12 per cent as against a national average of 24 per cent. The relatively depressed counties were mainly in the West and North; unemployment was the average for Great Britain in every county on the mainland of Scotland west and north of Banff, with the small exception of Nairn, and in all the counties on the west coast as far south as Lanark and Ayr. Unemployment in Aberdeen was consistently the level for Great Britain as a whole from 1927, the year when records were first published, until 1933. The passage in 1943 of the Hydro-Electric Development Act, providing for extensive electrification in the North and North-east of Scotland, substantially improved the prospects of this and other forms of new industrial development.
