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If you want a haulage firm to shift a pallet of your goods from Manchester to London, it should cost you around £45.

But if you want it trucked from Lanarkshire to London, it will cost you less. Perhaps £38.

Some hauliers may be willing to offer you less than £30, which is below their costs.

This is just to fill up space on the south-bound trip, because while there's still lots of freight heading up the A1 and M74 to supply Scottish businesses and shops, there's far less Scottish produce now available for the return trip.

Yet it's only by filling trucks on all their trips that the freight industry can make its profits.

Those figures aren't good news for the haulage industry, particularly the Scottish businesses that depend on the England-Scotland routes.

Typically small operators, they are up against much bigger hauliers who can cross-subsidise their more northerly destinations with a wider range of English and continental routes.

More widely than that one industry, this tells you a significant story about the state of the Scottish economy.

It's true that many of the most successful manufacturing businesses - for instance, Weir Group, Clyde Union, Aggreko and BVT - shift a lot of their produce by air, train or ship.

Others, in the service sector, can deliver online.

But the lorry remains a vital link for getting Scottish goods to market - not only to England, but to English ports.

And these freight costs show that Scotland is making a whole lot less than it was.

The biggest gap in recent years has come from electronics.

It's not that Silicon Glen has disappeared. Scotland still shifts around £4bn in export earnings from its electronics sector.

But only ten years ago, it was shipping more than £11bn worth.

And from the point of view of the hauliers, it doesn't help that electronic products have become more compact.

The other lesson worth noting is how important the rest of the UK is to Scottish businesses.

The most recent input-output tables tell us that 42% of Scottish added value is accounted for by Scottish customers.

While 10% is investment, and 17% is government expenditure, 31% is exported from Scotland.

Of that 31%, 21 percentage points are accounted for by England, Wales and Northern Ireland, while 10 percentage points are sent further afield.

The Scottish government has policies to develop its links with its major trading partners - notably the US, Germany and China, with more emphasis being put in recent weeks on India's potential.

So what's the policy on exports to England?