Enhancing Our Understanding of a Regional Economy: The Complementarity of CGE and EIO Models
Description
Economic impact models are powerful tools for the assessment of policy changes in regional economies. Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models have grown in popularity, becoming the dominant choice of practitioners and academics in this field. This popularity has been at the expense of an older class of model, the Econometric Input Output (EIO). The present paper demonstrates how both models, using the same input data, may yield different outcomes. However, the paper suggests that EIO has been underutilized even though it provides a strong complementary tool accompany that enhance analyses using a CGE approach. This paper urges regional economists to rediscover the EIO model, especially two variants that are described in the paper, and bring them to the forefront of their research agenda.