Download the full FY 2019 report here.

The estimates on this site provide information on how expenditures related to activities on Interior lands affect jobs and economic activity, at the National and state-levels. However, there are additional economic values related to DOI resources that are not captured in markets, like the clean air and water provided by healthy forests, storm protection from coastal wetlands, and the values people place on scenic areas or sites of cultural importance. Including these values in our totals would give a more complete picture of the impact of Interior's activities. Nevertheless, applying the methods to value these nonmarket goods and services is outside the scope of this analysis.

Methods

This analysis relies on IMPLAN, a widely used Input-Output (I/O) software and data system, for estimating the economic contributions of Interior activities in terms of economic output (sales), value added (contributions to GDP), and employment (jobs). IMPLAN is best used to examine "marginal" changes: the estimated jobs and income coefficients are valid only for relatively small changes in spending within a particular area's economy. Any stimulus large enough to change the underlying structure and trade relationships of the economy will necessarily change the relationships quantified in the coefficients, and new models would need to be developed. The data underlying IMPLAN are collected by IMPLAN from multiple Federal and State sources, including the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Census Bureau. Additional information about IMPLAN can be found at: www.implan.com. More information on the use of IMPLAN and other methods employed for this report can be found in the technical appendix, available for download here.

In general, I/O models rely on "multipliers" that mathematically represent the relationship between spending in one sector of the economy (e.g., expenditures by recreationists) and the effect of that spending on economic output, income, or employment in other sectors of the economy (e.g., suppliers of goods and services to recreationists). Multipliers developed from I/O models vary by economic sector and the geographic area of analysis (i.e., there are different multipliers for local, state, regional, or national level analysis). Multipliers also reflect secondary effects of an initial stimulus. For example, spending by recreationists is a stimulus to suppliers of recreational goods and services (the direct effect). This spending results in additional "ripple-effect" stimuli to firms and workers employed by these suppliers. The income and employment resulting from these secondary purchases by input suppliers are the indirect effects of visitor spending within the economy. Furthermore, employees of the directly affected businesses and input suppliers use their increased incomes to purchase goods and services. The resulting increased economic activity from new employee income is the induced effect of visitor spending. The indirect and induced effects combined make up the secondary effects of visitor spending. The sum of the direct and secondary effects describes the total economic impact of visitor spending in the economy under analysis. Any spending that occurs outside this economy is termed a "leakage." Comparing estimates of economic contribution across years is problematic because many factors may be changing at the same time. These factors can include:

• Changes in land use. These might be due to changes in resource demand or management decisions, or may reflect a natural progression in a project's life cycle, such as a shift from construction to operational status.
• Changes in the data describing a resource's annual economic output. These might be due to actual changes in the quantity or price of a good produced, or changes in data collection and assumptions.
• Changes in the economic models that describe the underlying structure of local economies. For most sectors, these models are developed independent of the DOI Economic Contributions report. In some cases, new models that better describe individual sectors may replace models used in prior reports. In other cases, the assumptions and data within the models may change significantly from year to year.

As noted above, measures of economic output only account for goods and services bought and sold in markets. External costs and benefits not reflected in market prices are thus not included in economic output estimates, so contribution statistics (output, value added, and employment) may over- or understate the actual contribution a given activity or sector makes to the economy. Nonmarket values like environmental improvements or degradation can be important components of total economic welfare. For example, cleanup costs from an oil spill would increase GDP, though this provides little information about the total economic costs incurred by individuals and society overall.