Model Overview Definition of Terms

Hi Walker, For your first 3 questions, these values represent Gross Demands by Study Area Households, State & Local Government, and Federal Governments. You can see these demands in greater detail in the Explore> Study Area Data> Institutional Demand Sheet. For questions 4 and 5, these are domestic and foreign exports of commodities. We do not describe who the purchaser is of exported goods and services, so this is a gross exports value; however you can see the commodities exported by Industry in the Explore> Social Accounts View By: Institution Local Commodity Demand. The imports are both those used for Intermediate Demand and Institutional Imports. More detail on these can be found in the Explore> Social Accounts View By: Commodity Trade. Questions 6 and 7 Institutional Sales: These are the sales of goods and services produced by governments, households, capital and inventory in the study region. This article will further explain Institutional Sales: https://implan.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=645:645&catid=261:KB40. As regards why the Institutional Sales and Imports are negative. Imports are a negative value because the reduce the wealth of the region because those dollars are spent on purchases that are produced outside the defined regional economy. Thus they represent the total value of imports, but are negative relative to GRP. Here are reasons why GRP does not include Institutional sales (and thus they need to be subtracted from GRP): • Inventory: If part of the Final Demand was met by Inventory sales, those goods were not produced in the current year, so their value should not be included in the current year’s GDP. Their value was already counted in the GDP value in the year in which they were produced. • Government Institutions: Most government sales come from surplus from things like price supports (i.e., they bought extra grain last year to keep grain prices up), which is basically like government “inventory” and should be treated like other inventory. In the case of USFS timber sales, those could legitimately be counted as part of GDP but since they come from a government institution that is mostly administrative (i.e., not a government enterprise), those sales are not counted. • Households: These are sales of used goods and scrap, which thus were not produced this year and thus should not be included as part of this year’s GDP. It is a BEA convention to include institutional sales as negative final demands - we maintain the BEA convention but report the negative sales separated out (i.e., as sales rather than final demand) in the Model Overview. When a user looks at the regional reports in IMPLAN, the final demands only contain the positive values – i.e., the sum of them will match the total final demand value listed in the Model Overview Screen