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 In another nod to the advancement of regionalism, the Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council, which spearheads a number of initiatives designed to promote investment in local communities and enhance the economic conditions of the citizens who make their homes in the area, is pleased to announce the availability of a new tool that will help it provide its constituents with high quality information about the economic impacts of proposed activities and unexpected events. The Council, like other Regional Planning Councils in Florida, has acquired a state-of-the-art economic modeling program -- the Regional Economic Modeling Inc.?s (REMI) Policy Insight ®.
REMI?s modeling system uses hundreds of programs developed over the past twenty-five years to build customized models for each part of the country. This makes the REMI model sensitive to diverse policy and project alternatives and to interactions between the regional and national economies. With REMI Policy Insight ®, the Council will be able to generate realistic year-by-year estimates of the total regional effects of many policy initiatives. A wide range of variables will allow the Council to represent the policy or regulatory issue to be evaluated while the explicit structure in the model will help interpret the predicted economic and demographic effects. The model is calibrated to the region with economic and demographic variables, as well as policy variables, so that any policy that affects a local economy can be tested.
The Council is working in partnership with the Economic Development Offices throughout the region and Florida Gulf Coast University as it ramps up for the debut of REMI Policy Insight ® in Southwest Florida. The partnership with Florida Gulf Coast University allows the Council to tap the expertise of the university and to work with its newly established Regional Economic Research Institute.
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