Last Sunday I drove a hired Fiat Ducato van across the Tay Bridge to Dundee. In that direction, the crossing is already free. Driving back cost me just 80p. Were I to repeat that return journey each and every working day for a full year, the toll would cost me, in total, £208. Were I a small local business dependent on my white van for my living, that's the kind of annual saving I can now expect when the new Scottish Government legislates to abolish tolls on the Tay and Forth bridges.

A welcome gesture in terms of equity in bridge pricing across Scotland, certainly. But the "undoubtedly welcome boost to the local economies in Tayside" claimed by Alex Salmond, when he unveiled his minority administration's Programme for Government this week? Hardly. For an SNP government which, like its Labour/LibDem coalition predecessor, claims sustainable economic growth is its "highest priority", this is small-beer politics. Very small beer.

So where's the economic beef in this programme? The First Minister is promising much from his new Council of Economic Advisers, which meets for the first time two weeks today. The nine men and two women who make up the inaugural council will, Mr Salmond assures us, "provide expert guidance in driving up Scottish growth". However, as he waxes lyrical about "the most formidable intellectual firepower ever to have tackled Scotland's economic underperformance", he rather implies Scotland has never tried anything like this before.

Not so. In 1971 the old Scottish Office created the Scottish Economic Council, stuffed with leading business figures, to advise successive Secretaries of State on how to improve Scotland's economic performance. It survived right through the pre-devolution period, but subsided into a rather dessicated, annual talking shop. In 1998, the year before Holyrood opened its doors, the first First Minister, Donald Dewar, replaced that council with a new Scottish business forum. One of its many members was Dr George Mathewson, who chairs the new CEA. But who remembers it or anything it achieved, less than 10 years on?

In 1995 some of the big wheels in Scotland's private sector launched Scotland International, an attempt to tap into business expertise in the worldwide Scottish diaspora, through an annual Gleneagles brainstorming session. It spawned new enterprises such as Scottish Knowledge and Scottish Medicine, designed to sell distance learning from our universities overseas and exploit a range of health products/ services respectively. Both expired. The Determined to Succeed entrepreneurship programme in Scottish schools is SI's only lasting and largely publicly-funded legacy.

Then there's the international advisory board established by Scottish Enterprise in 2002, which includes another CEA founding member, Crawford Beveridge, and SE's globalscot network. And, finally, that array of prestigious, mainly American economics talent, brought together in the Allander Series by Wendy Alexander four years ago, to catalyse yet another debate about where the new Scotland should be heading in material terms.

Down the years when Scotland's growth rate, as the SNP constantly reminds us, "has not been good enough", our national trade in expert business and economic advice has remained remarkably buoyant. However, what has been achieved by it all is rather harder to discern. For 15 of those years, the two members of the new Salmond council already mentioned, George Mathewson and Crawford Beveridge, were in charge of Scotland's main economic development agency. Mathewson ran the SDA from 1981 to 1987. Beveridge ran Scottish Enterprise from 1991 to 2000.

Both avowedly favour Scottish independence. So do at least two others on the CEA, Professor Andrew Hughes Hallett and Professor John Kay. One might assume that two others, the Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner Finn Kydland and the director of Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute, Professor Frances Ruane, would not be minded to deprive Scotland of what their own countries have long enjoyed. So that gives independence an inbuilt majority on the 11-strong group.

But in line with the realities of minority government and Alex Salmond's own stated intention to "move with mainstream opinion to build consensus in the public interest" his new council will presumably turn its early attention to how to deliver higher growth within a devolved settlement. That means a lot more than abolishing a couple of bridge tolls.

When first flagged up, the new council was apparently going to set a growth target for the Scottish economy and then monitor, quarterly, progress towards meeting it. Now it seems the initial growth target has already been set by the new government - to raise Scotland's growth rate to match the UK as a whole by 2011. According to the programme for government published this week, that target and others "around competitiveness, productivity (and) population" will be set out in a new government economic strategy.

The council, it continues, will "help us develop" that strategy. But there are some problems at the outset. Even on Holyrood's own growth statistics in recent times, Scottish growth is already close to matching the UK as a whole. The most recent Scottish figures, for the first three months of this year, strayed again well below the UK performance. But independent survey evidence, from the banks and others, questions the validity of that divergence.

Then there is the recent analysis by economists John McLaren and Richard Harris questioning the reliability of official data throughout the period of devolution and pointing out that half the perceived underperformance on growth disappears if allowance is made for the fact that Scotland's population has not grown at anything like the rate of the UK.

If the new Council of Economic Advisers is to command widespread respect from the outset, it surely has to address this issue. Before it endorses a growth target that tasks the Scottish economy with matching UK growth by 2011, could it please assure us all that the official data on which that assumption of long-term underperformance is based is robust. McLaren and Harris have crystallised doubts some of us have harboured for a long time. Even the new chairman of the more independent Statistics Commission at UK level is acknowledging some key economic numbers may be flawed. The governor of the Bank of England has expressed similar doubts. The problem doesn't just affect the growth story across these islands. It afflicts population projections, too.

If we can't know how fast our economy is growing or where our population is heading with any degree of confidence, how can we draw firm conclusions about our comparative ranking in the prosperity stakes? That's surely where the new council's intellectual firepower should be directed in the first instance.