Employment vs. Industry Sales

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Tymon Silva

• May 09, 2016 02:54

Hello, I just had a quick question concerning the use of substituting an employment value instead of the traditional change in Industry Sales when running an Industry Change activity type. If anticipated Industry Sales is not available to me, but expected employee head count is provided for the company under analysis, how accurate is the Industry Sales cell value when it auto-populates after entering an employment number? I notice that IMPLAN makes an attempt at filling out the rest of the cells, given just an employment figure. I am just curious of the accuracy when running the model under these conditions and if I can consider this direct input as reasonable and common. Sometimes, Industry Sales data is not provided to me, and I need to make an attempt to capture the economic impacts of a specific Industry Change. Are there some general ways of estimating Industry Sales for a specific company (sifting through Census Data or 10k-forms) or would you recommend just sticking with the direct employment figure to generate your results? Thanks! Tymon

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  IMPLAN Forum

  • May 09, 2016 16:54

  Hi Tymon! Thank you for your forum post. Entering an Employment input value as a way to proxy Industry Sales; is an appropriate way to model an impact. The order of operations that we recommend, if possible, Industry Sales (field if known), followed by Employee Compensation, Proprietor Income and then Employment. However, since the only input value you have is Employment, that is the best information you have to work with at this time. When IMPLAN estimates Industry Sales from the starting point of Employment, because Employment is a less reliable value because of the nature of Employment as a headcount and the current mix of the proprietor and wage and salary workers. Thus the Output per Worker value is a flat ratio of Total Industry Output/Employment for all the firms in that region for the year of the data set. An additional thought, if you wanted to dig deeper into other data sources, we never discourage that, but it may not be worth the time, and proxying from Employment is a common usage of Industry Change Activity Type. Thanks! IMPLAN Staff

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