An Economic—Ecologic Model for Evaluating the Environmental Repercussions of Area Development

T HE acquisition of new industry has been the major goal of many rural areas in the United States in the years since World War II. Faced with rapid mechanization of agriculture and decline in farm influence, many areas have ignored the environmental costs associated with industrial development and have welcomed any and all industrial prospects. In the late 1960's, however, came a noticeable shift in emphasis; acquisition of industry began to be viewed as a mixed blessing, and local leaders began to be questioned often about the environmental consequences of particular types of areas in economic growth. Industrial development groups found themselves hard-pressed to answer many environmental questions. Techniques for quantifying the trade-offs between area economic growth and environmental quality are needed if planners and public administrators are to respond to these questions and identify the paths of developments that will do minimum environmental damage. One possible approach to analysis of the environmental repercussion of area economic development is modification of the basic static Leontief model. Such a model can be structured to show not only interindustry transactions, but also intersystem flows between an area economy and the local ecosystem. The model contains two basic elements: (1) the Leontief inverse of an area input-output matrix and (2) an environmental matrix containing data on resource use or residual emission per dollar of gross output for each sector in the input-output matrix. Operational implementation of the model is achieved by post-multiplying the environmental matrix by the Leontief inverse. The results show both the direct and indirect effects on resource use and re