Product: Economic Impact Explorer

The Economic Impact Explorer displays outcomes from Limestone’s STUDIO model, a state of the art model developed in collaboration with universities and governments to measure the impact of economic changes and investments. The model breaks results out by industry, location, and time period to provide decision makers with the insights they need to make informed choices. The tool provides an interactive dashboard to explore these insights, customizable for the questions that are most relevant for your situation. 

• Build customized model scenarios to assess the impact of shocks on the economy such as major investments, trade policies, pandemic lockdowns, extreme climate shift, political instability, or volatile oil prices on employment and output 
• Capture the real impact with updated data across subgroups (by gender, age, region, industry etc.)
• Visualize economic impact by community and sector of various investments and policy scenarios, and see how outcomes change with different policy and investment details

 

Helping you answer questions in the face of economic uncertainty

• What do alternative local investments mean in terms of overall job growth and income gains? 
• What are the costs of a natural disaster? How are these costs distributed across industries and locations?
• Which sectors and locations are most at risk of downturn? How are these risks distributed across demographic and income groups?  
• Which sectors offer the greatest growth potential? 
• How might the manufacturing sector be impacted by a shift in trade relations with a neighboring country?
• What might be the impact on employment of an increase in government spending on infrastructure? 
• What might be the impact of a fourth wave of COVID-19 lockdowns on workers and businesses?
• What is the expected return on investment of a labor market development or jobs training program?
• And more…

Get a deeper understanding of your local economy and introduce interventions for sustainable, inclusive, and resilient economic growth. The Economic Impact Explorer helps your team analyze data and assess the economic effects of disruptive policies and economic shocks (positive or negative).

Why do you need this?

Your Local Economy, Your Dashboard

An Economic Impact Explorer can be customized for your location and its specific policy and investment decisions in order to allow your team to explore the current economic composition of your economy, comparing outcomes across sectors and communities. Get it customized by adding new scenarios surrounding your policy decisions or in the face of external events that can have a negative or positive impact on your economy. The dashboard can be accessed through a secure private portal or embedded in a public website.

Connect the Dots 

We update the Economic Impact Explorer as new data becomes available, making sure that the results remain up to date and the visualization reflects the best available information as it becomes available. Generate real-time reports that can inform decisions without the need to waste time on conducting research on direct and indirect impacts of events on economic parameters such as employment and production. 

 

 Insights to Results

Learn, evaluate and analyze the data. Utilize easy to access dashboard among team members and get insights on your screen 

• Use evidence for investing on short- or long-term policies and interventions 
• Prepare for the shocks and plan ahead based on reliable data and analytics 
• Learn about the gaps and avoid unexpected outcomes

 

What is under the Hood?

Short-Term Under-capacity Dynamic Input-Output (STUDIO) model 

The STUDIO model captures the interconnection between geographies and industries, which we calibrate using Input-Output (IO) Summary Tables, inter-provincial and international trade flow data and labour market data from existing government data. We then use the framework to estimate the economic impact of shock (for example COVID-19) over a 12-month period under alternative forward-looking scenarios about the speed of recovery, government policy, and medium-to-long term changes in consumer preferences etc.

Who is this for?

This dashboard helps in designing projections and expected outcomes of any business-as-usual scenario matched with unexpected shocks. So if you are a county, district, council, city, or even a state. This tool will help you to design a flexible framework for exploring a range of economic shocks. Find the solution that fits your desired community. 

Term

The data on the dashboard is updated at regular intervals or monthly. The assumption and scenarios are provided for over a year. 

Related Publications

More details about STUDIO and the underlying economic theory can be found in the economic literature.

• Christopher Cotton & Bahman Kashi & Huw Lloyd-Ellis & Frederic Tremblay, (2020). Quantifying the Economic Impacts of COVID-19 Policy Responses on Canada’s Provinces in (Almost) Real Time. Working Paper 1441, Economics Department, Queen’s University.