Transportation Costs by Industry

Hi Dorothy, If you go to Explore > Social Accounts > Balance Sheet tab, and then select View By: Commodity Balance Sheet from the drop-down menu, you can then select whichever transportation commodity of interest from the drop-down menu, at which point you will see every industry's expenditures on that type of transportation. The Gross Inputs for each industry show that industry's total expenditures on that type of transportation for that year. The Regional Inputs for each industry show that industry's expenditures on local providers of that type of transportation for that year. Regional Inputs = Gross Inputs * RPC for that commodity. Note that Absorption shows the expenditure as a proportion of that industry's total Output. Please contact us if we can be of further help.

Thank you very much for your response. I do follow it but have a couple more questions: What do you mean by “The Regional Inputs for each industry show that industry's expenditures on local providers of that type of transportation for that year”- how does this number differ from Gross Inputs? Is this by any chance a measure of for-hire versus in-house transportation costs? I also did not entirely understand how you derive Gross Absorption, Regional Absorption and RPC. Thank you, Liat

Hi Liat. The Gross Inputs show how much of each input is purchased, while Regional Inputs show how much of each input is purchased from local producers. So, basically rephrasing your statement about “for-hire versus in-house transportation costs, Gross Inputs represent how much an Industry/Sector spends (in your case) Transportation services to produce its output. Regional Inputs represent how much of these services the industry/Sector is able to purchase locally or within the study region. A Regional Purchase Coefficient (RPC) is the proportion of the total demand for a commodity by all users in the Study Area that is supplied by producers located within the Study Area. For example, if the RPC for the commodity ’’fish’’ is 0.8, then 80% of the demand by local fish processors, fish wholesalers, and other fish consumers are met by local fish producers. Conversely, 20% (1.0-RPC) of the demand for fish is satisfied by imports.