Robert Burns worth £157m a year to Scots

ROBERT Burns is contributing £3 million a week to the Scottish economy more than 200 years after his death, experts said yesterday.

They have calculated his brand value at 157 million a year. Two-thirds of that comes from tourism, with Ayrshire getting most of the benefit.

The Moffat Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University was commissioned to prepare the study on how the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth could be used to boost tourism and encourage Scots to return to Scotland.

The report says: "It is clear that the potential for 2009 is significant, yet Robert Burns has to be embraced by a population who remain distant from their national literary figure."

But that could be overcome by effective marketing and a "realistic" sequence of events.