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Frequently Asked Questions About the At A Glance Reports

Benefits to People Reports

1. What is the difference between the Jobs and Income At A Glance (AAG) reports and the Benefits to People AAG reports?

The Benefits to People AAG reports explain some of the benefits provided by our forests, such as recreation opportunities, cultural resources, forest products, grazing, water, and minerals. The Jobs & Income AAG reports detail the contributions these resources make to local economies.

2. What year is the report for?

The reports were published in 2018 but use the most recent available data from various sources, which range from 2015 to 2017.

3. Where did the data come from and for what year?

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Economic Contributions Dashboard

1. What is the difference between the Economic Contributions Dashboard and the Benefits to People At A Glance (AAG) reports?

The Benefits to People AAG reports explain some of the benefits provided by our forests, such as recreation opportunities, cultural resources, forest products, grazing, water, and minerals. The Economic Contributions Dashboard details the contributions these resources make to local economies.

2. What is the Economic Contributions Dashboard site useful for?

The dashboard serves as an easy reference for many levels of the Agency and the public. As calls for information come in, resource specialists, planners, Forest Supervisors, Regional Office staff and Washington Office staff have this information readily at hand, with assistance from economists and social scientists on interpretation. Since the dashboard will be updated every three years, the information may be useful for forest planning assessments. Please consult with your regional contact for questions on application of information and assumptions regarding underlying data and analysis protocols.

3. How does this information differ from the Economic Profile System?

Information displayed on the Economic Contributions Dashboard differs significantly from the information contained in the Economic Profile System (EPS), but the two systems are complimentary. EPS gives trends and conditions, generally, for a particular county or set of counties. The dashboard displays, concretely, the economic ties between Forest Service management and local communities. For example, EPS can display how many people are employed in the entire forestry and logging sector in an area, but the dashboard is more specific in linking harvest from each National Forest with logging companies in the area. As another example, EPS can tell us how many people in the area are employed in the hotel and lodging sector. In contrast, the estimates on the dashboard show:

• the direct effects of lodging and other purchases by National Forest recreationists, plus
• the ripple effects that direct purchases have in the economy; including supplies purchased by the hotels, motels, campgrounds, wages paid to lodging employees, etc.

In short, EPS gives a picture of the economic and demographic environment for the Forest while the Dashboard answers the question, “So What?” Specifically, the “So” question describes the actual Forest Service management and the “What,” describes the economic consequences for the local economy.

4. Why can’t we add up forests?

If we were to run, for example, a state model using the exact same resource data as we put in individual forest models, the results would not be the same as adding up the individual forest results. In the same way, if we run the data for two forests together in the same analysis area model for some objective, the results would not be the same as adding up the individual forest results. So, why does the sum of the pieces not equal the whole?

This can occur because Output or income per Worker and other factors may be larger in a region of economic concentration than in a state as a whole. While, typically, state impacts are larger for Direct and Induced there are circumstances where state ratios of income per worker or other factors may be significantly lower than a county's.

The state represents a weighted average of all the individual county relationships, so if your county has a lower Output per Worker, Labor Income per Worker or lower Regional Purchase Coefficients (RPCs) then it will likely be less than the state average. If you have a region that is higher in one or more of these then it will be larger.

Generally, larger Study Areas have less leakage due to imports and larger RPCs. For example, as we move into larger geographies the amount of local supply to meet local demand increases, and thus purchases that were imports to smaller regions are now local in larger geographies. But this is not always the case. An RPC can actually be smaller if the additional geography increases demand at a higher rate than it adds to supply.

As noted above, it is possible for an industry to be more concentrated in terms of output per worker, and compensation per worker in a region than in the state as a whole. This region would be described as being more specialized in that industry than the state as a whole. When the analysis area is expanded to include the less specialized area (perhaps the remaining state is more rural that the county where the economic change is occurring) output per worker, and compensation per worker decreases.

5. Why are results only available for FY 2019?

The Dashboard is dependent on two data types, which have a time lag before they are available:

1. IMPLAN, a commercial software and data package that gives a baseline picture of the underlying economy and interactions in an economy, and
2. Central corporate databases providing National Forest expenditure and use information for timber, grazing, minerals, and recreation (such as National Visitor Use Monitoring (NVUM)).

6. Why aren’t ecosystem services and non-market values included?

These reports look only at measures of jobs, income and Gross Domestic Product. Measures of Ecosystem Services are available in the Benefits to People Reports.

7. What is an “economic area of influence”? How is it defined?

The economic area of influence for each National Forest and Grassland was painstakingly defined using a detailed protocol. This yields an analysis area that more clearly delineates where the greatest interactions are between Forest Service resource management and the local economy.

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USDA Forest Service
Ecosystem Management Coordination (EMC)
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