Economic Impacts
All economic activities generate benefits, and sometimes costs, for society. These impacts may be salaries and employment for workers, profits for businesses, tax revenues for governments, etc.
Economic benefits generated by a given activity (building a highway or a manufacturing plant, an increase in exports to the United States, higher expenditures by European tourists in Quebec City, etc.) are spread across Canada. For instance, the construction of a hydroelectric dam in northern Quebec generates revenues across all of Quebec regions as well as in other provinces.
Complex networks of commercial exchanges and household expenditures generate a flow of economic benefits across a region. For example, an expenditure taking place in a region of Ontario (let’s say Sudbury) will most likely generate benefits in many other parts of the province. The same phenomenon can be observed around the country: an increase of consumer or business expenditures in a province will have a positive impact on the economy of other provinces.
It is important for decision makers in both the private and the public sector to fully understand the overall economic impacts, positive and negative, of a given project or a specific public policy proposal. Such a complete understanding requires several pieces of information, including when required a cost benefit analysis. It is especially important to grasp the indirect and induced economic impacts (which together are referred as spin-off benefits) at the regional level.
Regional development
Regional economic development is a very challenging issue. The sheer complexity of problems facing stakeholders and public sector policy makers compound the difficulty inherent to their job. The number of economic agents involved and the interaction of a high number of relevant factors have a profound impact on the success potential of policy initiatives (environment, economy, social and political facets, etc.). This is compounded by the fact that most stakeholders do not have access to tools enabling them to analyse and better understand the economic situation of a given region.
It is increasingly recognized that local communities must play a pivotal role in their own social and economic development. The availability of tools aimed at facilitating decision making plays an important role in the development of knowledge at the local level. These tools can both assist communities in planning a long-term approach to economic development and also develop implementation plans.
It is therefore essential to simplify the work of regional development professionals by providing them with tools facilitating the diagnostic of economic circumstances and their root causes at the regional level (province, regional district, county, etc.). These tools can also play an important role in identifying the various options at their disposal and to track the actual impacts of selected initiatives to verify that policy and program initiatives do in fact fulfill the stated objectives (and, if deemed necessary, to make required changes).