Margins for farm machinery and equipment

Farm machinery is sold to producers not households. The margins in the software are for PCE. We actually carry industry margins in the model database but the software does not have the hooks to use them. You will need Access to look at the margins. Open up the .impdb file representing your regional model with Access. Table “Common Margins”. Go to Type 2 (industry) margins choosing the sector representing farm machinery (203). Industry margins tend to be heavy on producers (.77) and wholesale trade (.206), virtually no retail and some transportation. These are from the 2002 BEA benchmark. Thank You

So how would I model the impact changes to a farm implement dealer? The dealer has $10+ million in annual sales, but the goods are produced outside of the study area. The only local impact would be the difference between sale price and cost of goods sold.

Since Sector 203 represents the manufacturing of Farm Machinery and Equipment, as opposed to the selling of it, I would recommend using the wholesale sector (319). If you go to Help > Sector Search and type in "farm equipment" you will see that "Conveying equipment, farm, merchant wholesalers" are included in sector 319. In this case, you will want to put in the entire sales value (10+ million); then when the message box pops up you will want to leave it at the default option ("Gross Retail Sales") - this way, the software knows that the wholesaler does not get to keep this entire amount and it will apply margins for you. However, note that you will not get any impact on sector 203 with this method, since sector 319 represents the wholesaling of all types of things and the software does not know that you are working with farm equipment in particular. If sector 203 exists in your region, you could model the producer's portion of the sales values as a separate Event for sector 203. Likewise for the transportation margins. Nationally, the industry margin for 203 is 0.7667, with 0.2063 going to sector 319, 0.0012 going to sector 332 and 0.0258 going to sector 335.