1972
The Rural Development Act of 1972 creates the need for a more efficient economic modeling tool.
WHO WE ARE
Yes, we’re the leading provider of economic impact data and analytical software. But we’re so much more than just that.
Having spent decades serving the economic data needs of academics, governments, economic developers, corporations, nonprofits, consultants, and more, the trust we’ve garnered and the relationships we’ve built throughout domestic and international communities is what we value most.
WHERE WE’RE GOING
In 2016 we decided to throw out the entire rule book…or at least most of it. We kept the good and decided to get to work on everything we could improve.
Today, after entirely redesigning our aesthetic, overhauling our approach to bringing impact analysis to the forefront of business strategy, and welcoming a host of new faces to help get us there, we’re completely reimagining the role IMPLAN will play in the future of modern economics.
And it’s way bigger than we thought.
40+ YEARS EXPERIENCE
An Unrivaled History
of Economic Expertise
Reflecting on IMPLAN’s Impact
In the early 1970s, the U.S. government encountered a need for more exhaustive, functional economic statistics. Though effective methods for gathering and reporting national economic data had been established, analysts needed a more advanced system for turning that information into an actionable asset for local economies to put to use.
In 1976, the National Forest Management Act required the United States Forest Service (USFS) to cultivate a 5-year management plan which presented both alternative land management strategies and their potential resource outputs and socioeconomic effects on local communities. In cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the USFS played a role in the creation of two linear programming models: FORPLAN and IMPLAN. FORPLAN (short for “forest planning”) estimated the resource outputs of land management strategies, and IMPLAN (short for “impact analysis for planning”) estimated the economic effects of those resource outputs on local communities. The USFS officially began modeling economic impacts with IMPLAN in 1978 and still does so to this day.
It quickly became clear that the USFS’s ad hoc procedures for assembling regional I/O data sets for use with IMPLAN were too inefficient to sustain a large-scale nationwide system. So, in 1985, the responsibility for developing IMPLAN data sets shifted to the University of Minnesota. As demand grew for regional models by non-USFS organizations, IMPLAN (then Minnesota IMPLAN Group (MIG, Inc.)) was established as an independent corporation for the purpose of developing and selling all future iterations of the IMPLAN database and software.
“The Forest Service uses the IMPLAN database and modeling system to carry out economic impact studies of the consequences of Agency decisions and proposed actions and to describe the current economic contribution of natural resource management on the National Forests and Grasslands.”
Ecosystem Management Coordination,
US Forest Service
A MODERN TOOL FOR MODERN ECONOMICS
Economics Keeps Evolving.
And So Does IMPLAN.
A Transformation Decades in the Making
For years after the formation of MIG, Inc., IMPLAN was developed for and used exclusively by the federal government. In 1988, IMPLAN was used for the very first time outside of a federal government agency. Then in 1991, MIG, Inc. took its first ever commercial order. Accompanied by a series of releases of new software versions and continually expanding collections of data fueling them, IMPLAN spent the next several years gaining more recognition, growing in scope, and most importantly…becoming more accurate.
1999 was a big year for IMPLAN. After a multitude of updates and improvements to the software in order to make it more practical and more easily accessible to a wider range of users, MIG, Inc. released IMPLAN Pro Version 2.0. This innovative, landmark version of the software was the first to implement the now-standard social accounting matrix (SAM) and its subsequent SAM multipliers to organize data, recall information, and process calculations quickly and efficiently.
In 2004, IMPLAN incorporated trade flow information into the software’s operations for the first time. Offering insights into the multidirectional movements of goods and services between economies, regional trade flow data allowed for multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis with IMPLAN. The incorporation of commuting data shortly thereafter advanced MRIO capabilities even further. With the inclusion of those sophisticated insights into IMPLAN Version 3.0, it became one of the earliest ever commercial tools with the capacity to educate users on the importing and exporting behaviors of commodities between the economies of neighboring regions.
In 2013, MIG, Inc. officially changed its name to IMPLAN and relocated its headquarters to Huntersville, NC. Soon after, in mid-2015, IMPLAN released an online subscription-based version of its classic software called IMPLAN Online.
MIG, Inc. (1984 – 2013)
IMPLAN (2013 – 2016)
IMPLAN (2016 – Present)
Partners
TREDIS extends the IMPLAN system to enable broader applications of economic impact, benefit-cost and financial analysis for transportation planning, programming and project analysis.
While IMPLAN can be used by itself to estimate broader impacts of construction, business location and business expansion changes, TREDIS adds capability to also assess business and economic responses to transportation projects or policies that change travel times, costs, reliability, mode split or trip distribution patterns for passenger and/or freight travel.
TREDIS works by providing a dynamic, multi-regional economic impact simulation model to estimate regional impacts in terms of employment and income changes over time. It incorporates the full industry structure of IMPLAN – an economic input-output model that portrays industry relationships between producers, consumers, and institutions for any given region. To that, TREDIS also adds dynamic forecasting of long-term changes in the economy, general equilibrium equations representing labor force and industry cost responses, and transportation effects. This makes TREDIS the tool for IMPLAN users to also analyze transportation projects.
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