IMPLAN Blog

Data season has finally come to a close which means that the latest IMPLAN Data Year is now available! Here's what's new in this data release:

After more than a year since Amazon’s deadline for RFP submissions, over 200 subsequent submissions, and a culling of 20 possible locations earlier this spring, we’ve finally (almost) got our answer—an HQ2 with one foot in Crystal City, Virginia and another in Queens, New York. And mere hours after the news broke, markets are already reacting in some rather severe (and not altogether unexpected) ways.

Late in the summer of 1949, Wassily Leontief fed the 25-ton computer the last of the stiff paper punched with precisely-placed holes. The machine at Harvard University now had hundreds of thousands of data points about the United States economy.

Demand for jet engines is taking off. Domestic airlines have relied on up-fitting or remodeling equipment originally constructed in the 1970s or later. This generation of equipment is slowly approaching its expiry. And internationally, travel tastes have changed. Airlines are one-upping each other to offer the most top-of-the-line luxury flights which are incorporating features including personal compartments with beds, full-service bars, and incredible food options.

Amazon recently announced that it would be raising the minimum wage paid to workers to $15 per hour (minimum wage standards sometimes vary by state and city; the current federal minimum pay is $7.25). According to the company’s blog, the wage increase will go into effect on 1 November, will be extended to associates employed by temp agencies, and is anticipated to affect the paychecks of more than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as more than 100,000 seasonal holiday employees. Workers at Amazon subsidiaries (including Whole Foods) will also benefit from the parent company’s new initiative to “lead on pay.”

Back in August we published a blog post to address one of the most common questions asked of us, “What Is IMPLAN?” One of the reasons this question remains a complicated one to answer is that economic impact analysis benefits such a diverse set of users (from academia, to federal government, to real estate and everything in between). To elaborate beyond what IMPLAN is and illustrate what it does, let’s take a look at some of our common user types and a high-level example of how each of them applies the power of economic impact analysis in their spheres of study or in their industry.

Being equipped with the proper data as well as the right analysis tools can help you make better and more informed business decisions. IMPLAN provides excellent data that can supplement your analyses. Our latest release of the Occupational Data Matrices joins the ranks of those supplemental data sets. This data set provides information on employment and compensation, which might just make determining wages and allocating scarce resources a less arduous task.

Back in April, we were storm-chasing Tornados and growing wary of the fast-approaching prediction of an active 2018 Atlantic Hurricane Season. Today we are living out this prediction, as Hurricane Florence, a dangerous category 4, is barreling towards our East Coast.

IMPLAN’s HQ is nestled in the bucolic margins of Lake Norman and a mere stone’s throw from Charlotte’s city center—751 feet above sea level. We’ve all been hitting the refresh buttons on our screens to catch every change to the weather models as hurricane Florence slowly creeps toward our coast from seas which seem to have made it a banner week for tropical storms.

Economic impact analysis is, at the end of the day, only a fraction of the work necessary for understanding and communicating the significance of an economic event (whether business- or policy-related) to the people who might be most affected by those economic changes. The remaining work related to getting the word out happens in press conferences, on phone calls, and online. Here’s our best advice on how to recruit the media’s help in getting all that work done—excerpted from one of our recent white papers, Creating a Compelling Economic Impact Report.