A Two-Step Approach to Detailed Estimating State-to-State Commodity Trade Flows

A major problem in developing interregional-interindustry models, including multiregional input-output (MRIO) models, is how to combine seemingly incompatible databases. This research aims to estimate state-to-state commodity trade flow tables by major industrial sectors for the U.S. useful for creating an MRIO-type National Interstate Economic Model (NIEMO). The model is based on IMPLAN and related data for 2001. Constructing NIEMO was challenging because of the limited availability of commodity freight shipment data between the states. This helps to explain why a NIEMO-type model has not been developed in recent years, in fact not since Polenske (1980). As one of the two basic sets of tables along Chenery-Moses lines necessary to construct NIEMO, interregional trade tables to estimate trade coefficients by states and industry had been available from the U.S. Commodity Transportation Survey Data since 1977, but reporting was discontinued for some years. For the years since 1993, this data deficit can be met to some extent with the recent (CFS) data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). Available since 1993, the CFS data are widely used, but they have several inherent problems (Erlbaum and Holguin-Veras, 2005: 3). Recent attempts estimate interregional trade flows using data from the 1997 Commodity Flow Survey (CFS), based on IMPLAN data made this clear to us. This study suggests a ne