Sarah Deas is Chief Executive of Co-operative Development Scotland, a subsidiary of Scottish Enterprise (economic development agency).
The world market for subsea services could be worth $40 billion by 2011, according to Scottish Enterprise, a development agency.
Economic development agencies Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise face a £40m cut, with the savings redistributed to housing.
Today, the landscape is idyllically peaceful, and Highlands and Islands Enterprises, a regional development agency, encourages small farming and other local initiatives, but the brutality of the evictions is still alive in folk memory and in Gaelic laments.
Whatever the argument for or against development agencies and enterprise partnerships, one thing is clear, the LEPs are here to stay.
Another, perhaps unforeseen, consequence of the switch from development agencies to enterprise partnerships is that they have identified opportunities for forming ad hoc alliances and partnerships across local, and sometimes regional boundaries.
Last year, following an inquiry routed through Scottish Enterprise, an economic development agency, Japanese visitors turned up in Grandtully.
They now have to repay some of the government cash.James Hunter, the mild-mannered chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, an economic development agency, has been the subject of demonstrations accusing him of Mugabe-style tactics.
IBM's factory at Greenock, for instance, one of the first foreign arrivals and the biggest single employer, now does little mass assembly work, concentrating on selling tailor-made computer systems and providing back-up service work.Scottish Enterprise, an economic development agency, recognised the need to get higher-value-added work into Scotland some time ago.
A skills survey by Scottish Enterprise, an economic development agency, found that there is a rough balance between the number of graduates and of jobs available, that there are more people with a good secondary education than white-collar jobs for them, and not enough people with low qualifications for the unskilled jobs available.
