It’s an economic impact model that tracks how activity in one region affects every other region it’s economically connected to through trade and commuting, rather than stopping at a single study-area boundary.

No. MRIO is available with any IMPLAN subscription that includes access to multiple regions — there’s no separate license or paid add-on. If your account can already select more than one region, you can build an MRIO event today.

A standard (single-region) analysis treats any spending that leaves the study area as lost. MRIO instead follows that spending into the linked region and models what it generates there, giving a fuller picture of total impact.

Leakage is spending that crosses your study area’s boundary. In a single-region model it’s simply subtracted from the total; in an MRIO model, that same spending is tracked to where it actually lands and counted as real impact there.

Direct effects are the immediate activity from the event itself. Indirect effects ripple through the supply chain. Induced effects come from household spending of wages earned from the direct and indirect activity, and in an MRIO model, all three can occur across more than one region.

As many as the study requires — from two adjacent counties up to complex, large-scale, nationwide breakdowns. Very large builds (100+ regions, Congressional Districts, statewide Combined Regions) use IMPLAN’s Large-Scale MRIO capability, which requires a quick access request through your CSM rather than being on by default.

Whenever the activity you’re measuring plausibly crosses a jurisdictional line — a multi-state project, a facility drawing workers from neighboring counties, or a supply chain that isn’t contained within your study area. IMPLAN’s own guidance: if you want to report state-wide ripple effects from activity in specific counties, MRIO is the better choice over a state-level model.

Aggregation bias happens when a region is drawn so broadly that it becomes a weighted average of everything inside it a statewide number for an industry can look nothing like the real figure in any single county that makes it up. MRIO lets you define regions more precisely, so those real differences stay visible instead of getting averaged away.

Yes. If, say, a company opens a headquarters in one county and a smaller satellite office in a neighboring state, MRIO can model both as separate direct impacts within the same analysis, while still capturing how they affect each other through trade and commuting.

Not exactly: MRIO results are slightly non-linear. A project five times larger won’t produce results exactly five times as large, because bigger flows take more modeling cycles to fall below the threshold IMPLAN uses to stop tracking inter-regional trade. In practice, this means results scale a little more than proportionally as a project grows.

Forward linkages trace an industry’s output downstream, to what buys and uses it, rather than backward to its suppliers. It’s a related, separate capability (IMPLAN’s Forward Linkage Suite) that MRIO extends across regions, so downstream effects like a tariff or price change can be traced beyond a single area.