Fine scAle eConomic daTa
FACT
FACT develops reproducible datasets and estimation routines for fine-scale economic structure. It uses detailed and up-to-date official statistical and remote-sensing information to estimate employment, input-output relations, and domestic trade flows at fine spatial and industrial scales. The estimation procedures are based on explicit representations of the economic mechanisms that shape the localization and organization of economic activity.
Approach
Reproducible analysis workflow
FACT workflows are based on official statistical data sources and openly accessible code, documentation, and service containers. The data services are structured so that analyses can be regenerated from source data and updated when new official periods become available. Estimation procedures are specified separately for each application and documented with their data requirements, assumptions, and validation checks.
European employment estimation
European employment is estimated as a constrained allocation of official parent totals to finer geographies, with U.S. observed fine-scale employment used as training evidence and European predictions constrained to official European totals. The current architecture supports country to NUTS 1, NUTS 2, NUTS 3, and LAU downscaling.
U.S. county IO and domestic trade flows
The U.S. county workflow uses BEA make/use tables before redefinitions at producers' prices, with BEA summary- and detail-level products. County production-side values are distributed using employment shares from QCEW, final demand using population shares from the Census, and domestic trade flows are estimated with a balancing cross-hauling trade-flow methodology using county-to-county road travel times. The methodology reference is doi:10.1080/00343404.2017.1286009.
European regional IO and trade flows
European regional IO and trade-flow estimation extends the US balanced regionalization approach to NUTS 2, NUTS 3, or LAU units while adding FIGARO country-to-country totals as aggregate constraints. Eurostat national SUT/IOT data at current prices and FIGARO current-price inter-country supply, use, product-by-product IO, and industry-by-industry IO tables are used jointly with employment estimates described above. Cross-country regional flows are constrained to match FIGARO country-pair totals, while within-country flows remain available to satisfy subnational balancing.
Codebase
Source code and containers
Repository group
FACT source code, database build files, service containers, and analysis routines are open source and licensed. Repositories are organized under the FACT GitLab group.
Results
Published datasets
US county IO and domestic trade flows, 2021
County-level regional IO tables and domestic trade flows for the United States in 2021, at BEA summary-level industry detail (67 summary categories).
US county IO and domestic trade flows, 2017
County-level regional IO tables and domestic trade flows for the United States in 2017, at BEA detail-level industry detail (389 detail categories).
Citation
Authorship and DOI
Author
Riccardo Boero. Single components and result datasets have their own DOI. This project was initiated with the generous support of a SIS internal project from NILU.
@misc{boero_fact,
author = {Riccardo Boero},
title = {FACT: Fine scAle eConomic daTa},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.17605/OSF.IO/PV4ZW},
url = {https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PV4ZW}
}