Building Small City and Town Sams and CGE Models

In this paper we attempt to describe both the data sources and organizational methods that allow for effective and easily created SAMs and regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) models. Small cities of around 100,000 people will face very different constraints than a town of 2000 people. Unfortunately, most CGE models typically describe relatively large geographical areas and are therefore not able to capture the uniqueness of individual cities within the region. An illustrative example using these methods demonstrates that the economic impacts vary substantially over different municipalities to the same economic shock.