20 Chapter 2: Economic impacts on the Westchester County economy IN THIS CHAPTER , we estimate the following economic impacts of SUNYWCC: 1) the operations spending impact, 2) the student spending impact, and 3) the alumni impact, measuring the income added in the county as former students expand the county economy’s stock of human capital. When exploring each of these economic impacts, we consider the following hypothetical question: Howwould economic activity change in Westchester County if SUNYWCC and all its alumni did not exist in FY 2021-22? Each of the economic impacts should be interpreted according to this hypothetical question. Another way to think about the question is to realize that we measure net impacts, not gross impacts. Gross impacts represent an upper-bound estimate in terms of capturing all activity stemming from the college; however, net impacts reflect a truer measure of economic impact since they demonstrate what would not have existed in the county economy if not for the college. Economic impact analyses use different types of impacts to estimate the results. The impact focused on in this study assesses the change in income. This measure is similar to the commonly used gross regional product (GRP). Income may be further broken out into the labor income impact, also known as earnings, which assesses the change in employee compensation; and the non-labor income impact, which assesses the change in business profits. Together, labor income and non-labor income sum to total income. Another way to state the impact is in terms of jobs, a measure of the number of full- and part-time jobs that would be required to support the change in income. Finally, a frequently used measure is the sales impact, which comprises the change in business sales revenue in the economy as a result of increased economic activity. It is important to bear in mind, however, that much of this sales revenue leaves the county economy through intermediary transactions and costs.6 All of these measures – added labor and non-labor income, total income, jobs, and sales – are used to estimate the economic impact results presented in this chapter. The analysis breaks out the impact measures into different components, each based on the economic effect that caused the impact. The following is a list of each type of effect presented in this analysis: The initial effect is the exogenous shock to the economy caused by the initial spending of money, whether to pay for salaries and wages, purchase goods or services, or cover operating expenses. 6 See Appendix 4 for an example of the intermediary costs included in the sales impact but not in the income impact.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM2NjgzMA==