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Let's start with the relatively good stuff, as that doesn't take long.

A: Scotland is not Latvia or Ireland, facing double digit contraction, brutal public spending cuts, and doubts that the deficits can be funded.

B: Labour market fluidity remains remarkably strong.

The labour market survey which measures all those who face at least a period of unemployment over a three-month period shows the numbers moving into unemployment is clearly up, but so are the numbers leaving unemployment - up from 19,000 per month a year ago to 25,000.

Some may be withdrawing from the labour market, but lots of them must be finding new jobs.

C: The economy will get better, eventually.

But that's about as good as it gets in the Scottish ITEM Club report, published today.

Using the same Treasury economic modelling that Alistair Darling has been using, it finds a much less optimistic outlook for getting out of recession.

The Chancellor reckons the UK economy will be back in growth by the end of the year, and rapidly so. This independent use of his figures says the UK and Scottish economies will stagnate next year and get into sluggish growth in 2011.

But as we know by now, the employment picture will struggle to catch up with the recovery of the rest of the economy. And the specifics of the ITEM analysis make bleak reading.

It foresees another eight years before the level of employment and of unemployment return to 2008 levels.

At sectoral levels, there is a grim outlook for manufacturing jobs, with a rapid fall in jobs by 2011 - down from 220,000 before the recession to only 160,000 by 2019.

Those jobs aren't coming back.

The recovery depends heavily on the large and diverse sector known as 'business services'.

This has done exceptionally well in job creation in Scotland during the boom years for the property market - far better than for the UK as a whole.

Employment in this sector increased by 83,000 between 2002 and 2007, or 31% - more than twice the UK growth rate.

Breaking that down, the sharpest growth between 2002 and 2007 was in real estate management, up more than three times faster than the UK rate, by 242% to 12,200. The figures were up 75% on research and development jobs.

The big numbers were in architectural and engineering/technical consultancy, up by 52% over those five boom years to 44,900 jobs.

The business services sector is on course, according to ITEM Club, to lose 44,000 jobs between 2008 and 2011.

That is partly explained by nearly half of its sub-sectors being property-related.

And here's the catch.

This is the sector which the Scottish ITEM Club sees as essential to growing Scotland out of recession from 2011 to 2018. Simply to get back to 2008 employment rates by then would require business services to put on 50,000 new jobs.

If the property sector remains sluggish, that's going to be hard to do. And it will require Scottish business services to be good at penetrating markets outside Scotland.

Of course, business services include the areas where Scots face lower-wage competition from the IT-enabled sectors in developing countries led by India.

This coming week, a small group of Scots will be learning how it's done.

But to do so, they have to go to a conference in Bangalore organised by Nasscom, the ambitious trade body for Indian outsourcing and offshoring.