ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at existing tools rather than inventing new ones, though some space will be given to relatively recent developments such as qualitative impact analysis and VAR (Vector Auto-Regression) and similar time-series forecasting methods. Techniques are primarily analyzed in a policy-related context. Regional input-output models are capable of dealing not only with standard economic impact analysis problems, such as changes in final demand associated with the growth and decline of existing industries and the entry of new ones, but also with more direct policy influences such as fiscal incentives to industry or infrastructrure subsidies. Shift-share analysis has been widely used as a diagnostic and descriptive device for explaining changes in regional industrial structure, as a forecasting method, and, more rarely, as a guide to policy analysis. Demoeconomic models represent a desirable type of such a simultaneous model obtained by integrating submodels for the demographic system and the economic system with important interdependencies between them.
