The Global Remainder and Global Economic Impact Studies

INTRODUCTION

The IMPLAN International Product includes the Global Remainder, an aggregation of countries developed for modeling global economic impacts. A user can include the Global Remainder region along with all other countries within the International Product as part of a Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) analysis to capture the global impacts from Events taking place in any number of the individual countries. 

The Global Remainder is comprised of economies not individually covered by the IMPLAN International Product. It is a combination of countries from all over the world that have no relation to each other except for the fact that detailed I-O national data is not yet available for these countries. As country coverage can change with each International Product release, so too can the economies contained in the Global Remainder.  

This article describes the data sources for the Global Remainder and provides links to each International Product Data Release, which contain the list of individual countries covered by each release as well as the countries included within the Global Remainder. 

PRIMARY DATA SOURCE

Data for IMPLAN’s Global Remainder comes primarily from the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables, the same raw data source used for IMPLAN’s country-to-country trade data.  

An important feature of the OECD ICIO tables is that trade flows are globally balanced, meaning that total exports are equal to total imports at the global level for all goods and services combined. In generating the ICIO tables, the OECD uses import and export data for as many countries as possible to determine the size of the world economy, ultimately using 198 economies for global trade balancing. This means that the OECD ICIO database contains trade flows not only for the countries it covers individually (and subsequently the individual countries covered by the IMPLAN International Product), but also for a “rest of the world” (ROW) aggregate. IMPLAN uses the OECD ICIO data for the ROW aggregate, along with other data sources, to develop a region called the Global Remainder.1

The link below will download a spreadsheet that lists the full 198 economies that the OECD uses for global trade balancing. Countries individually covered by the 2020/2019 release are highlighted in blue. Countries included in IMPLAN’s Global Remainder region are not highlighted in the table.

Countries Used for Global Trade Balancing

Download

CONSTRUCTING THE GLOBAL REMAINDER

While the OECD ICIO tables provide Output and Total Value Added by Industry for the Global Remainder region, they do not provide all the necessary details to run a full impact analysis. For example, there is no direct reporting of Employee Compensation (EC) or Employment by Industry for the Global Remainder region. Similarly, there is no tax data. Therefore, IMPLAN estimates these data points using several different data sources.

Employee Compensation by Industry is estimated using a ratio of Employee Compensation per Total Value Added by Industry for all non-OECD economies and aggregates, as reported by the OECD in the Trade in Employment (TiM) database.  

Estimates of Employment by Industry are then generated using an Employment per Employee Compensation ratio for all non-OECD member countries also covered by the IMPLAN International Product. Note that this is not all non-OECD member countries as defined above, but non-OECD member countries for which the International Product has coverage. This ratio is applied to the Employee Compensation by Industry estimates above to derive Employment by Industry.  

Finally, we use a similar technique to estimate taxes for the Global Remainder. In this case, we use ratios of taxes per GDP for all non-OECD member countries that are also covered by the International Product and apply that to the Global Remainder’s total GDP. 

GLOBAL ECONOMIC IMPACT STUDIES

The Global Remainder was specifically developed to allow users to conduct a fully global MRIO analysis. A user can include the Global Remainder along with all other countries within the International Product to conduct an MRIO analysis to capture the global impacts from Events analyzed in any number of the individual countries. The Global Remainder region accounts for economic activity in all other economies not individually covered by IMPLAN’s International Product. It was specifically designed for use in MRIO analyses to more fully capture the Indirect effects in the countries that the International Product does not explicitly cover. 

Given the data generating process, the Global Remainder region is not a functional economy and should never be the principal Study Area in an analysis. The only use case for the Global Remainder region is in an MRIO analysis with all other countries already included. 

RELATED ARTICLES

2020/2019 International Product Release Notes

 

1IMPLAN uses the term Global Remainder instead of Rest of World (ROW) so as not to confuse it with the U.S.-based ROW account, which has a similar meaning in many respects but is not an exact equivalent. 

Written 8/29/2024