(ECONOMICS COMPONENT)
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Assessment (MARA) Human Dimensions Working Group will perform two main functions pertaining to economics in the Assessment. First, it will serve as a data support group providing information on major economic indicators for the MARA Region as a whole and for its various subregions. Second, it will translate estimates of physical impacts from each of the other working groups into direct and indirect dollar impacts.
The core of the first contribution is the Impact Analysis for Planning (IMPLAN) System. This consists of comprehensive and highly disaggregated industrial sector data for every county of the MARA Region. Moreover, the IMPLAN System provides the capability to generate input-output tables for any county or county grouping. These data sets provide context for many of the other studies in the MARA Project by revealing the relative prominence of individual industries, the interconnectedness of the regional economy and the degree of its self-sufficiency. The IMPLAN data can also assist in projecting the demand for key resources (e.g., water and energy) and for projecting emissions of greenhouse gases. The MARA Human Dimensions Group stands ready to provide these data to other members of the research team.
The IMPLAN database will serve as the major data input into a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model of the MARA Region. CGE is a model of the entire economy based on decisions by individual producers and consumers in response to price signals, within limits of available capital, labor, and natural resources. It represents the state-of-the-art of regional economic models and has been further advanced to incorporate climate-related features by members of the MARA Human Dimensions Working Group in conjunction with their research activities in Penn State's Center for Integrated Regional Assessment (CIRA). The CGE Model will be used to translate physical impacts on coastal areas, ecosystems, forests, agriculture, and health into direct dollar damages. These will in turn be run through the model to determine the region-wide ripple effects of climate change. These results will be disaggregated by sector, socioeconomic group, and sub-area.