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Our nation's leading economists are unimpressed by the quality of recessionary debate by the commentariat, which includes ... well, probably those know-alls who write blogs and sound off on the airwaves, whoever they may be.

With the sponsorship of their own industry body, Universities Scotland, these leading laboratory boffins of the dismal science have come up with their own commentary.

And unlike some others, they have graphs, tables and case studies. It's called evidence, and they would prefer it dominated the debate rather than "whomever shouts loudest".

Cynics won't be surprised that such a group should reach the conclusion that university level education and research is the key to unlocking the nation's future.

Their paper, 'What Was/What Next?', doesn't actually appeal for more cash. Led by economics professor Anton Muscatelli, principal of Heriot-Watt University and soon to take over at Glasgow University, they are subtler than that. And such cynicism shouldn't stop their work from getting attention, not least because it makes for provocative reading.

To cut through the econo-speak, one sentence sums it up: "If we do no more than fix the holes in the hull of our economic ship in recession, we will find ourselves adrift with no engine once the recession is over".

What constitutes the plugging of such leaks?

Some of the policies being enthusiastically supported by the Scottish Government, others pushed by the opposition, and even a few supported by all sides.

Apprenticeships, for instance. That brought Labour support behind the SNP budget last week. A good idea, surely? No. The economists' evidence says Scotland has already excelled, by international standards, at post-school, sub-degree training and that appears to be at saturation level.

They even suggest you stand a stronger chance of being unemployed with apprentice-level training than if you hadn't bothered.

The political attachment to apprenticeships "increasingly looks like a hangover from a previous age", and smacks of an "anti-intellectualism directly opposed to Scotland's economic interests".

(It's tempting to wonder if these guys have had need of a plumber recently, and if so, did they wonder why academics are worse paid. But that's anecdotal evidence, which is banished from this analysis.)

Too many graduates? Wrong again.

That's where skill shortages and skills gaps are found and forecast.

And rather than take a view of the economy in terms of "people-shaped holes", they urge a more dynamic sense of preparing for jobs we haven't yet envisaged. In nano-technology, for instance, there are no jobs outside universities for now.

But if you wait for them to come on stream, the nano-technology industry will already have been established somewhere else.

With renewable energy technology, biotechnology, data storage and creative industries, nano-technology is held up as the kind of business that could be the smart place for Scotland to put its effort.

Better that than try to shore up industries that are already becoming unsustainably uncompetitive.

That puts sacred employment cows at risk. Economic history includes a graveyard of once great Scottish industries that didn't die, but moved elsewhere, leaving much pain behind when Scots lost their competitive advantage; textiles, shipbuilding, steel, microchips.

Should we perhaps be adding financial services to that list, as we watch IT-enabled services shifting to low-wage economies where skill levels are rising fast, notably China and India?

And if we are to avoid a return to debt-fuelled spending boom, is retail any place to plan our future?

The Big Idea is to aim not at a job-saving strategy, but a job replacement strategy.

And in what kind of company? At Scottish Enterprise, its new focus is on companies with growth potential. Smart thinking? Wrong again.

The economists reckon it would be smarter to aim for lots of small competitive companies in a brains-driven economy rather than lots of jobs in a few corporations.

They also emphasise the need to focus on exports, to plug Scotland's long-standing non-oil trade deficit.

Simply by building an economy aimed at selling goods and services to one another is no way to grow employment. Construction, they point out, employs roughly the same share of jobs at the start of the 21st Century as it did 100 years before, because there's a finite amount of demand for buildings in Scotland.

Surely there can't be much dispute over the Scottish Government's high profile cutting of business rates to help corporate growth, learning the lesson of Irish growth, Holyrood's push of resources into cutting class sizes, its splurge on reducing rail journey times?

Wrong on all counts. Each of them is criticised for failing to target resources where they can have most impact.

There is a detailed debunking of the link between tax cuts and the Celtic tiger's growth, as if recent events in Ireland hadn't debunked enough.

And in the other cases, the economists warn that resource is not being properly targeted to where it can have most effect, both in skills and in providing incentives for tackling Scotland's long-standing, long-noted and "terrible" private sector research and development deficit.

"Scotland's performance is poor," says the report. "Our national spend on R&D is better than embarrassing only because of the contribution of universities."

Scottish business spend on it, as a share of national income, stood in 2005 at little over half of the UK or European figures and a sixth of Finland's.

"This is a significant failure in the Scottish economy which has been tolerated for too long without action."

And while there may have been "hidden innovation" in the once mighty financial services industry, we now know the finest mathematical modelling graduates were actually being paid squillions to apply their brainpower to devise the fiendishly complex derivative assets that brought about the banks' downfall.

"The UK has been complacent about it its poor R&D record and may now pay a price," says the report. "Scotland is in a worse position again."

With that being one of few references to the economic powers reserved to Westminster, this is a document aimed explicitly at the Scottish Parliament. So will it find a receptive audience?

Actually, this might be rather well-timed. The passage of the budget in recent weeks - blocked at first, then approved with only two votes against one week later - hints at a state of flux in politics as MSPs and their parties struggle to find responses to recession.

Alex Salmond yesterday made clear he's in mid-term mode, which is as much a time for re-energising his administration as it is about planning for another one.

This is the year to do some serious thinking and ground preparation for all the parties' 2011 manifestos.

The answers to these tough economists' challenges will be a test of them all and of Holyrood's maturity as it reaches its 10th birthday.