A new report from David Swenson, associate scientist, provides a more complete picture of an industry's economic impact on Iowa's economy.
Agriculture and manufacturing are at the heart of Iowa’s economy, accounting for 38% of the state’s gross domestic product, according to "Iowa’s Major Final Demand Satisfying Industries," a new economic analysis from Iowa State University.
The report goes beyond traditional jobs and income data reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and measures all labor and supplies required to provide a commodity or service for export. Dave Swenson, associate scientist of economics, says the model provides a more complete picture of an industry’s economic impact.
“It allows important sectors like agriculture and manufacturing to declare the fraction of the total economy that they support,” Swenson said. “Another advantage is that it helps sort out industries that primarily produce items sold to out-of-state buyers and sectors that primarily support other in-state industries or households.”
Read the ISU news service story.
Swenson also spoke with
Perry Beeman, Iowa Capitol Dispatch about interpreting the states’ leading economic indicators index and why it had gone down so sharply in March.
And Dar Danielson, Radio Iowa, about Swenson's paper, "Iowa’s Major Final Demand Satisfying Industries."
And for a May 1 Ames Tribune story, "How the absence of an active university and its students looms large over Ames economy during COVID-19."
“The overall operation of the university over this period of time hasn’t contracted much — except a sharp retraction of events — with payroll still getting paid,” Swenson said. “What has changed dramatically is student life and spending by students.”
According to Swenson, ISU student spending is the equivalent of rough $25 million of total sales for the local economy, monthly.
And in a May 5 The News article, "Economists: March brought record economic dive in Iowa, trouble may last 18 months."
“We won’t know how the market reacts for six months or more,” he said. “We don’t know when schools will reassemble with any kind of normalcy. The epidemiologists think we will have another (virus) peak in June or July.
“This is where we are stuck, and we’re going to be like this for a long, long time,” Swenson added.
Iowa’s economy was flat for six months before the pandemic hit, Swenson said. But with low unemployment, flat was not necessarily bad, he added.
Swenson answered questions from Siobhan Hughes, Wall Street Journal, about the demographics of Iowa’s meat processing industry and whether government responses to the pandemic would induce higher voting rates among minority Iowans in hard-hit communities.