Modern regional input–output and impact analysis

What is it about?

Economic-impact analysis has a long tradition in the input–output (IO) field. A search on Google in April 2018 for impact analyses and IO models produced over 2.9 million records. Many were undoubtedly duplicates or referred to only one or other of these terms, but we were nevertheless impressed with the proliferation of this technique. Of the various applications of IO models, undoubtedly, impact analysis is the most widely used. Many of the early applications estimated economic impacts but, soon, analysts were also studying environmental, energy, transportation, land-use and other types of impacts, and these have been proliferating greatly in the past decade. Underlying the regional analyses is the important basic theory of IO and socioeconomic accounting. We begin by reviewing this basic theory in terms of some of the significant methodological debates that occur. Although not all developments are region specific, we cover them because regional analysts are beginning to adopt these theoretical advancements in their work. For the applications, we restrict our review to regional and multiregional impact analyses and the development of computer-programming packages that help analysts to conduct such studies quickly.

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