Government Expenditures

Federal Government Defense and Non-Defense

Federal Government expenditure, sales, and investment data come from the latest BEA benchmark I-O tables, adjusted to NIPA control totals for the current year.  National-level values are distributed to states and counties based on employment and employee compensation in Federal Defense and Non-Defense at the state and county level.

The one exception is Federal sales of stumpage, which is defined to be the sales volume of timber harvested (which includes sawlogs and all convertible volume) from National Forest land, and thus represents sales activity of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).  The USFS provides unpublished timber sales data at the state and county levels to IMPLAN.  The data is obtained from a database maintained by the Washington Office Timber Sale Accounting (TSA branch). The data consist of:

1. Normal distribution or revenues received by the USFS as a result of the timber sales.
2. Purchaser Road Credits (PRC) directly related to the stumpage volume.
3. Associated charges to purchasers not directly related to stumpage, including items such as road maintenance, slash disposal, and coop scaling.

State and Local Government Education, Hospitals and Health Services, and Other Services

We combine several data sources to get State and Local Government purchases and sales data. We start with values from the latest Census of Government (inflated to the proper year). We then replace any Census values with any available equivalent values from the Census Bureau’s annual State and Local Government Finances Survey. 

These data are totals – i.e., they do not have commodity specificity. At the state level, the resulting data represents the purchases and sales of State Government and Local Government combined, whereas at the county level, the data represents Local Government only. The state-level State and Local Government combined data are given commodity specificity upon controlling to U.S. commodity-specific values, which come from the latest BEA Benchmark controlled to current NIPA control totals. These state-level commodity-specific State and Local Government values are then distributed to the counties based on employment.