Specification of economic base multipliers in small Arizona communities

Despite a wide assortment of problems that cover a broad range of topics, from questions and doubts about its theoretical underpinnings, to a host of application difficulties, economic base analysis still figures prominently in the geographic literature. This thesis uses the Arizona Community Data Set to examine two important issues that remain unresolved or inadequately addressed in the literature. The results presented support Tiebout's hypothesis that the Keynesian macroeconomic approach, emphasizing the role of all the sectors in an economy produces more reliable multipliers estimates than Hoyt's traditional approach. Additionally, it is shown that, through disaggregation, it is possible to use the relationships between sectoral basic and nonbasic employment to produce multipliers that resemble those obtained through input-output analysis. Overall the results suggest that with the use of reliable survey data the economic base concept can still produce valuable information on the effects of an impact in a small community