As this was prior to Ireland leaving the United Kingdom, these returns were broken down into the three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. As was the practice at the time, the figures for Wales were included in the figures for England.

Clearly these were very different times in the life of the UK. The British Empire was at its height and there was barely any welfare state and no National Health System. As such, the tax and expenditure profile for the UK looked very different to today.

We will use 1899-1900 as an example to illustrate this.

Unlike today, the bulk of government income was from Customs and Excise with income tax only forming 15% of total taxation, whereas today Income tax and National Insurance make up 42% of the total.

The UK government also received substantial non-tax income, 16%, from sources such as the Post Office, the Telegraph Service and Suez Canal.

The UK's total government income in 1899-1900 was £128,813,000. This represents around 10% of GDP, compared to government income of 33.2% of GDP in 2016.

As well as there being vast differences in the revenue profile, government expenditure also had a very different composition to today:

Comparing these numbers to 2016-2017, where defence spending was only 4.8% of the total and debt repayments were only 5.1%, we can see how very different the role of the UK Government was at the turn of the 20th century.

Total UK expenditure in 1899-1900 was £143,687,000, leading to a deficit of £14,874,000.

As we can see from charts below, over the 21 years from 1900 to 1921 this distribution of revenue sources changed somewhat with a gradual decrease of income from Customs and Excise and an increase in both personal taxation and corporate taxes, including the introduction of an Excess Profits Duty in 1915-1916.

Some of the language in the documents is a little archaic, for example 'Imperial Expenditure' is used to refer to what we would now call 'Non-Identifiable' expenditure. Non-identifiable expenditure is a term used by HM Treasury to refer to spending that cannot be allocated as benefitting a particular region.

Identifiable expenditure was largely driven by the Goschen formula. The Goschen formula was based on a speech by the Chancellor G.J. Goschen in 1888 and applied a spending ratio to England, Scotland and Ireland of 80, 11 and 9. However, much like today, this only really applied to planned departmental budget (DEL in the language of today) and was frequently eclipsed by demand led expenditure (AME in the language of today) and contingency spending such as Law and Order costs for Ireland.

Unlike the GERS methodology there is no attempt made to allocate non-identifiable spending 'for' Scotland rather than 'in' Scotland. Therefore, in these returns, Scotland's expenditure does not include a share of the Army or Navy Spend, nor indeed any of the National Debt.

It is also worth noting, for the wider impact on the Scottish economy, that as we are looking at government revenue and expenditure only there is no attempt made to allocate non-identifiable government expenditure to private industry based in the component countries. This is significant, for example, the Clyde was a major player in the ship building sector and naval spend accounted for an average of 21% all government spend and 28% of 'Imperial Services' spend over this period. In his book Warship Building on the Clyde [3], the historian, H.B. Peebles, states the shipyards of the Clyde built approximately 40% of all warships from 1890 to 1939. T.M Devine also states that 'During the years 1914-18 Scottish Industry became a vast military arsenal for the greatest conflict in human history'' [3]. Consequently, Scotland's industry prospered greatly from Government spend on Imperial Services over this period.

If we set aside the impact of imperial service spend on the wider economy and focus on revenue and expenditure only then we can perform some basic analysis to determine Scotland's relative contribution and costs.

In the chart below, we can see that while the year-by-year numbers vary slightly, identifiable government expenditure directly in Scotland and England was slightly higher as a proportion of revenue raised, as an average of 30.6% in England and 34.4% in Scotland. Ireland's proportional spend was much higher, on average, at 82%.

We can calculate Revenue and Identifiable expenditure per head using the population numbers provided by the Bank of England in their Millennium of Data publication [5].

Identifiable expenditure taken in isolation does not provide us with the complete figures as this ignores the majority of government spending in this period. To obtain a fuller fiscal balance of each component country we need to assign a population share of non-identifiable government expenditure. In addition to this we will also assign a population share of non-regionally allocated Revenue (referred to as 'Other Sources' in the returns) such as the Suez Canal, The Royal Mint, Sales of War Property, War Reparations etc. to the revenue of the component countries. This results in the following expenditure and revenue figures per head for 1899-1921:

We can use these combined revenue and expenditure numbers to determine, a net fiscal balance (Surplus or Deficit) for the three countries over the period, as illustrated in the following charts: