IMPLAN Blog

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.

We talk a lot about economic impact analysis here but the question of economic impact is only one part of a multifaceted reality.

Researchers at the Michigan Department of Transportation had a different type of question. They didn’t want to just know about the jobs that could be created from constructing trails. They didn’t want to just know about tourism and retail spending that comes when people ride bikes or walk on those trails.

One of IMPLAN’s many uses is to simply quantify the impact of a given industry on its local economy—not a specific firm, but an entire sector.

That's exactly what CalNonprofits and a team of researchers at the University of San Diego did in their 2014 study, Causes Count: The Economic Power of California's Nonprofit Sector.