Inside My Fence

The Understand section presented information about how airports generate economic impacts by serving as job centers. This section takes that understanding a step further and offers an approach for collecting data related to on-airport activity. The information collected can either be used as a stand-alone representation of economic activity generated by your airport, or as an input to further economic modeling.

Estimates of on-airport activity, by type, are most commonly collected through surveys of airport managers and of tenants. Under the tools section below, you will find a number of example surveys. The airport manager is typically the first point of contact for collecting information needed to assess the economic impact of an airport, both inside and outside the fence. For this reason, a typical airport manager survey includes questions related to airport employment and airport tenants, which are both sources of on-airport economic impact. Additional questions may be asked to identify off-airport businesses that rely on the airport’s services as well as operations associated with visitor spending effects (see My Airport’s Business Constituency and Visitor Spending).

Economic activity can be characterized in terms of jobs, wages, and business revenue. Jobs are easy-to-understand measures of economic activity while wages and business revenue are indicators of the scale of likely spinoff effects in your economy: Wages drive local effects related to spending on consumer goods. The volume of business activity represented by sales is a driver of upstream impacts on suppliers. In many cases, you will only be able to collect information on jobs, by type, from your airport manager and airport tenant surveys.

Jobs figures alone may adequately communicate the scale and composition of on-airport economic activity. However, to more fully characterize airport impacts, wages and business revenue associated with jobs of a particular industry sector can be estimated based on a number of data sources, including:

• The U.S. Census Bureau’s Economic Census collects information on number of employees, payroll, and business sales, by industry sector. The data are collected every 5 years.
• The U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns offers data on number of employees and payroll, by industry sector.
• State agencies involved with workforce development. For example, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development publishes employment and wage data.
• Jobs and income data provided by private vendors, such as Moody’s Analytics or IMPLAN.

When reviewing available data sources, there are a couple of points to keep in mind. First, as the level of geographic or industry detail increases, the likelihood of data suppression in publicly available datasets also increases. Proprietary data sets are often based on combinations of public data, surveys, and algorithms to fill in missing data. Second, when comparing across data sources, it is important to be aware of consistency in data definitions. For example various definitions of wages/income may or may not include taxes, as well as benefits paid by employers. Because of the caveats outlined above, estimating the wages and business revenue associated with airport jobs is more complex than estimating jobs figures alone. Finally, the process of aggregating publicly available data sets to multi-jurisdictional regions may be laborious. If you have available resources and desire professional guidance, a consulting firm or local academic institution may be of assistance.