INTRODUCTION
IMPLAN's annual datasets provide a complete set of balanced Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) for every zip-code, county, and state in the U.S, as well as for Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands, Congressional District, and MSAs. These SAMs provide a complete picture of the specified regional economy.
To generate regional SAMs, IMPLAN collects the most recent economic data at various regional resolutions, completes and compiles it into a common framework (IMPLAN Industry Schemes), and constructs regional estimates of economic activity such that zip-code level data add up to county totals, county totals add up to state totals, and state totals add up to national totals. The more granular the geographic level, the fewer raw data elements available and the more estimation required to build a complete SAM for the region. This article provides a high-level overview of the process for constructing regional models.
GENERATING REGION-SPECIFIC STUDY AREA DATA
Raw data availability differs with each level of regional resolution. At the national level, nearly all database components are available, while at the state, county, and zip code levels, increasingly fewer raw data are available. County-level information is typically available for Employment, Employee Compensation, Proprietor Income, Population, Federal and State Government Finances, and selected wealth data, leaving the remaining county data to be estimated. At the zip-code level, only County Business Patterns (wage and salary employment) and demographic data from the Bureau of Census are available.
Not all elements of the SAMs for States, Counties, and Zip-Codes are estimated as part of the annual data development process; rather, the IMPLAN software develops region-specific SAMs during the model creation stage. More information about this process can be found in Constructing the IMPLAN SAM.
For more specific information about how a particular metric (Output, Employee Compensation, Employment, etc.) is estimated at a sub-national level, please refer to the metric of interest. More detailed information is available for smaller geographic regions in Estimating Congressional District Data, Estimating U.S. Territory Data, and Estimating Zip Code Data.
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Estimating Congressional District Data