Adding more than one new and related industry

Hi! Thank you for your forum post. We are happy to hear that the new Sector is working well for you, and just wanted to check to be sure that you are considering this a completely new line of production - thus increasing total regional Output and GDP. We ask because sometimes people use this technique to parse a Sector into a sub-component of another Sector's production, and it's important to be sure then that you reduce the original IMPLAN Sector's values by your parsed Sector's values. That doesn't sound like your case, but we just want to be sure to warn you about that. As regards your question, renaming the Industry does not, unfortunately rename it's primary commodity, and it also doesn't release that primary commodity from it's linkages to other local Industries and Institutions. Thus if you want to interlink these two new Industries in the Model you'll need to do it using the commodity label for tobacco in this case. Although the commodity will bear the wrong label, it will use the relationships you created when you took over that Sector to calculate the respective impacts. We apologize that this processes isn't cleaner, giving you a commodity label that matches your new Industry title. You can also verify this in the Explore> Social Accounts> Balance Sheet (Tab), and select View By: Commodity Balance Sheet and the Industry Institutional production tab. One other caution, in the table above you can also see Industry Demand and Institutional Demand for the commodity. You may want to check to ensure that your second Sector isn't supplying a series of unexpected and inappropriate production to other Sectors in the region, for example, if you took over coal mining because it wasn't in your region, you would find your new Sector processing function would be purchased by many other local Industries and Institutions in the region.

Thanks for your reply - that makes perfect sense. I also appreciate the heads-up about Industries/Institutional Demand for the commodity as well - I've reassigned the new sectors to others with out local Industries/Institutional purchases.

I am utilizing a similar technique for an analysis I am conducting for a suite of agricultural sectors. The issue that I'm facing is that the software appears to be calculating foreign exports for the industry based on data for the underlying industry (i.e., using the tobacco sector, which is blank in the default model to represent tomato farming). This is specifically an issue because the software is defaulting the foreign export value to equal gross commodity supply, which means that net commodity supply is equal to zero. Therefore, none of the value that would otherwise be attributed to the sector from, say, a tomato processor is actually circulating through my tomato farming sector. Any guidance on this issue would be appreciated.

Hello Aaron, Note that institutional production can occur even when no industry exists. This is one of the reasons why renaming the industry doesn't automatically change the primary commodity name. It looks like you posted something similar to this link: http://implan.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&view=topic&catid=80&id=19404&Itemid=1798#20849. Hopefully the response there also addresses this question, if not please let us know how else we can help. Regards, IMPLAN Staff