INTRODUCTION
Dollar Year. Data Year. Song of the Year. Year of the Tiger. Wonder Years. There are a lot of years to keep track of. This article will help users understand at least three of them and how to use them correctly in IMPLAN.
REGIONS SCREEN
Data Year is the year of the dataset utilized within a project. We recommend using the Data Year that matches the year of the data, which would be the year the Event took place. When modeling something that occurred this year or is expected to happen in the future, we recommend using the most current Data Year.
IMPACTS SCREEN
On the Impacts screen, there are two years with each Group. The Dollar Year should be set to the year that matches the entered values, typically the year in which the event occurs. The Data Year follows from the Regions screen and tells IMPLAN which dataset to use. IMPLAN will automatically apply the default setting as specified in the User Preferences.
RESULTS SCREEN
On the Results screen, Dollar Year shows the year of the value of the economic indicators and is not tied to the Dollar Year from the Impacts screen. IMPLAN will automatically apply the default setting as specified in the User Preferences, but users can change it using the Filters.
USING DIFFERENT DOLLAR YEARS
For an example of when Dollar Year on the Impacts screen will not be the year in which the event occurred, suppose an analyst was borrowing a visitor expenditure pattern from a survey that was done in 2015. Let’s say they want to use this data to estimate visitor spending in 2020. In this case, while the year of the event (that is, the year of the visits) is 2020, those dollars still represent 2015 dollars and must be characterized as such in order to generate correct results. By correctly telling IMPLAN that those values are 2015 values (by setting Dollar Year to 2015 on the Impacts screen), IMPLAN will know to inflate those values to the Data Year to ensure the correct values are applied to the multipliers.
If the analyst was setting up an event with an employment value instead of a dollar value (which is only recommended when there is no dollar value to set-up of the Event), the Dollar Year on the Impacts screen should be set to the year in which that employment took place or is expected to take place.
Defining Dollar Year in the Impacts screen correctly is essential to getting accurate Results. On the other hand, how Dollar Year is defined in the Results screen is totally up to the user and how they want to report the Results. If we want to report the effect of our 2020 visitors in 2020 dollars, we simply need to ensure the Dollar Year in the Results screen is filtered to 2020.
YEAR OF THE TIGER
IMPLAN users born in 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, and 2010 were born under the Year of the Tiger. Tigers are known to be very kind and imaginative. Learn all about Tigers from the article Chinese New Year.
Written August 30, 2023