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Assessment of regional economic impacts can be accomplished using either an input-output analysis or a social accounting matrix (SAM) analysis. While these approaches can generate important insights, they have significant limitations for some cases, e.g., the event of the need to reallocate limited resources such as land, labor, etc., because they do not include a complete set of decision makers' activities and managerial options. This study develops a flexible approach to link the firm level linear programming model to regional economic models to overcome these limitations, a LP-SAM. To demonstrate the LP-SAM a ranch-level economic model is linked to the regional SAM to investigate the impact of wildfire on the southeastern Oregon. The LP-SAM successfully traces out the decision makers' responses to wildfire and also regional economic impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned primarily with the economic and welfare consequences of federal redistributive grants to regional governments. We use a model that has two regions, each with households, firms, and a regional government as well as a federal government. The households, firms, and regional governments are all optimizers — households maximize utility, firms maximize profits, and we assume that regional governments are empire-builders in that they choose their expenditure and tax levels so as to maximize total expenditure — the size of their empire. Labor is free to move between regions in response to utility differences and does so until such differences have been eliminated. Interregional migration and federal government redistribution are the main sources of interconnectedness between the two regions. The model is linearized in log-differences and simulated using Australian state-level data. We find that the welfare effects of intergovernmental transfers are trivial but that all other variables of interest change substantially — consumption, employment, taxes, wages, output, and government expenditure. The welfare effects of a federal transfer are little influenced by the choice of empire-building rather than beneficent regional governments, but the influence on other variables is substantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the traditional economic base model remains a useful tool for regional analysis, in a multi-region context it fails to account for feedback effects. In addition, since the model is typically applied to individual regions, formal assessment of variation in the magnitude of regional multipliers is rarely considered. These shortcomings may be addressed by using spatial econometric techniques to model the economic base relationship stochastically. In this study, I incorporate spatial effects into the traditional economic base model and find empirical evidence that economic activity in Yucat´n, Mexico generates indirect impacts not only locally, but among other locations that are linked economically. These spatial multipliers may be employed to estimate the potential spillover effects of economic activity and analyze the implications of regional economic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]