1972
The Rural Development Act of 1972 creates the need for a more efficient economic modeling tool.
WHERE IT ALL STARTED
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 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 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
Our History
MIG, Inc. (1984 – 2013)
IMPLAN (2013 – 2016)
IMPLAN (2016 – Present)
Partnering with Industry Leaders
IMPLAN takes great pride in partnering with leaders in the field of economic data and research.
TREDIS extends the IMPLAN system to enable broader applications of economic impact, benefit-cost, and financial analysis for transportation planning, programming, and project analysis. 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, which makes TREDIS the tool for users to also analyze transportation projects.
IMPLAN has proudly partnered with the Mid-Continent Regional Science Association (MCRSA) to co-host biennial conferences for more than twenty years. We encourage furthering research and supporting the science of economics together. Our partnership’s commitment to this cause has fostered and supported training workshops, student scholarships, and research presentations for the last two decades.