Economic Impact Region for American Samoa
I am wanting to model expected job creation from a non-residential construction project in American Samoa with about $17M in construction and $1.2M in architecture and engineering. I am interested in US based job creation, including direct, indirect and induced jobs. The construction indirect/induced multipliers for construction for America Samoa as the region are low relative to multipliers on the mainland for similar amounts of construction, nominally. I am thinking that there might be significant slippage to Hawaii for indirect and induced jobs impacts. Would it make sense to combine the region of Hawaii with American Samoa? If yes, how would one do this if the American Samoa does not have a trade matrix (which is my understanding).
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Hi David! Thank you for your post. We appreciate the information that you have provided and we have a few points and questions to help us better ascertain how we can help you in framing your study. Are you anticipating bringing Labor from Hawaii or the mainland? If so this is important because these workers need to be treated differently from workers who are native to American Samoa. You would also need to know where those workers came from. Are you wanting to separate out the architectural and engineering expenditures from the construction Sector and model these separately? If so this requires additional analysis steps that we can help you with. We would also want to know if the firms responsible for the architectural and engineering services were on the island or coming from elsewhere. We would expect Multipliers to be lower in American Samoa or any island area because island areas tend to have significant import needs. Since products are being imported into the region (by construction as well as by local workers) this will naturally reduce the local impact of any expenditures in both the Indirect and Induced Effects thus creating lower Multipliers. Is there a specific effect that you are trying to capture, or specific inputs that you know are local that you are trying to demonstrate? We typically don't consider construction jobs to be created because they are typically sustained from one site to the next or are short term temporary jobs, thus we typically consider these jobs to be supported. When you state that you are looking at U.S. jobs are you trying to track back the supply chain of products from American Samoa to the mainland? This would be extremely difficult at this point in time unless you know where the inputs from your construction were purchased in Hawaii or on the mainland. Output per Worker and Labor Income per Worker are also specific to the region and effect the Multipliers. You can modify these assumptions if you know the number of jobs associated to the project, the amount local and non-local Labor Income payments for both the construction and architectural component if you want to examine those separately. These also are lower for American Samoa as they reflect the different cost of living and operating businesses in the region here is one interesting aspect to note in that regard: The highest Labor Income per worker in American Samoa is $80,000 only 175 Sectors (of 536) in the U.S. have Labor Income/worker > $80,000. We apologize we couldn't provide a direct answer to your question, but hope this will help us to better understand and help you with your analysis. Thanks! -
Hi David, Yes, as far as the Model goes, you technically can combine American Samoa with Hawaii. The Trade Method will become Econometric- RPC. However we do not recommend aggregating these regions for the reasons presented in the previous post. We would certainly like to help you setup your analysis, but without knowing more about the reasons why you are trying to connect these two geographically and economically disparate economies, we aren't sure exactly how to help.
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