How Not to Be Bamboozled by Local Economic Studies - Day Two

Editor's Notes

1. Total Hillb co employment in 2009: 571,000 for average annual pay of 45133 fpr $23/3 billion. (about 5-10 % of each). Personal income $45 billion (BEA)
2. No reason to believe that this avg expenditure has gone up so much? Recession, fewer overnight guests, but it’s the only thing that could account for the increase in total spending.
3. Another standard way to look at this is through sales, or revenues, of the place you’re studying. Most common in, say, sporting event where you can estimate the number of visitors and how much they’ll spend,. There are actually special mulitpliers from BEA for tourism and
4. Some standard multipliers for jobs – this appears to be only the direct and purchase effects, not the spin-offs. However, the source note on the paper version was wrong and it’s not online. I haven’t been able to reach the person who did it, but it looks right. Locally, these are also much lower at the local level, since much less of what’s used is from local suppliers.
5. More confusing, these are sometimes called direct effects, indirect effects and imputed or induced effects. Some places lump them together. Look for three types though.
6. This is an example from the RIMS II user manual, the operations phase of a stadium in Kansas City, Mo. The amounts are way out of date, but the breakdown is pretty common. It’s based on how much of the purchase comes from the area, and how local people spend their money. Using RIMS 2 is probably the most common way people make these estimates, though there are a couple of other standard models. They all come out to about the same thing.
7. One issue in the stimulus bill was how they told them to count the jobs – in an attempt to avoid OVER promising, it severely undercounted the effects. Reason: only counted the number of jobs directly funded by the federal government, in annualized full-time equivalents. This is about as low as it can be. No additional spending or other impacts – may result in skewing future priorities. Makes it look like a health care aid adds as much to the economy as a construction job.