THEORIES AND MODELS IN REGIONAL PLANNING:
GOALS ACHIEVEMENT MATRIX
The goals achievement matrix clearly sets out planned goals and marks them against objectives and the necessary steps / measures to achieve the goals. For example, Goal 1 could be to improve economic growth, which could have a number of policy objectives.
Goals Achievement Matrix involves the following activities: (i) explicit formulation of a set of objectives (as reflected in development plans) which should be broken down into measurable indicators that will serve as evaluation criteria; (ii) ranking or rating of alternative strategies against each individual objective; (iii) weighting of objectives for their relative importance to particular sections of the community; and (iv) Combining of scores to obtain relative measures of goals achievement for each alternative.

Advantage of GAM:
This method is highly participatory as it allows various sectors of the community to express their bias through the weighting of each objective according to their perception of its relative importance to their sector.

The rating of each alternative strategy according to its perceived contribution to the achievement of each objective is determined by choosing an ordinal number within a given range.

If no apparent relationship exists, then a rating of “0” is given.

If a relationship exists (+ or -) then the degree of relationship is indicated by the ordinal numbers 1, 2 or 3 representing slight, moderate, or high degree respectively. The score of a particular spatial strategy with respect to a given goal/objective is the rating determined by the particular sector multiplied by the sector’s weight assigned to that objective. Finally, the aggregate (algebraic sum) of sectoral total scores is taken, and though the sectoral scores reflect biases, the grand total of scores shown in the summary table amounts to the social consensus. The highest scoring alternative would be the preferred one.

INPUT OUTPUT GROWTH MODEL

A. What is an input-output (IO) model?

An input-output model is a way of representing the flow of money in an economy, primarily among industries, while also accounting for government, households, and regional imports and exports.

An industry is a group of business establishments that share similar end-products (or services) and processes for creating those products/services. Once the flow is represented in the model, a user can introduce events that change the flow (such as loss or gain of jobs/sales in one industry) and simulate its effects on each industry in the region, as well as the region as a whole.

This complex web of transactions can be arranged according to a particular accounting system called “input-output accounts.” They are called “input-output” because a portion of the output (i.e., sales) of one industry will appear as the input (i.e., purchases) of other industries. These accounts track the flow of money from one entity to the next, and from them we can get a sense of the interconnectedness of the industries, households, and government entities that occupy a given geographic space and build models to automatically simulate and display these relationships.

The input-output model therefore indicates how a change in one part of the economy will ultimately affect other parts based on these purchasing and selling relationships.

The IO model is centered on the idea of inter-industry transactions: * Industries use the products of other industries to produce their own products. * For example - automobile producers use steel, glass, rubber, and plastic products to produce automobiles. * Outputs from one industry become inputs to another. * When you buy a car, you affect the demand for glass, plastic, steel, etc.
The practical uses of input-output are of two kinds—descriptive and predictive.

In descriptive uses, the model simply informs users about the current regional economy:

* which industries have how many jobs and earnings, * what portion of an industry’s supply needs are likely purchased inside and outside the region, which industry clusters are most developed, * What the sources of residents’ income are, and so on.

It is even possible to analyze a region’s economic base (vital income-generating industries) using an input-output model.

Using a model descriptively can reveal new knowledge about an area’s economy that would be impossible to get otherwise, or it may confirm anecdotal evidence.

Predictive uses are just as important. For example, the model can estimate the total impact of a looming event in one industry. The event and its impact are described in terms of jobs, workers’ earnings, or sales. For example, entering a loss of 100 jobs in a local industry might reveal a loss of 75 additional jobs in several other local industries as a result of the economic ripple effects. Without the model, planners would not have been as well prepared for these indirect effects on the local economy.

Input-output can also be used proactively to assess alternative policies in economic development. We simply need to formulate these economic development goals into scenarios understood by an inputoutput model—that is, increased or decreased jobs, earnings, or sales in certain industries. Common scenarios might include attracting new businesses in a certain industry, increasing an industry’s earnings per worker, increasing economic diversity, substituting local for imported goods, expanding various industry clusters, attracting quality-of-life migrants, and so on. The current state, or baseline, of each of these measures is contained within the input-output model and is used to benchmark proposed goals.

Development planners can thus see where the economy might benefit from improvements, and conversely, where an investment is unlikely to generate substantial returns. With development goals in place, input-output is used to identify the best approach to attain those goals.

Suppose, for example, there are competing uses for some parcel of industrial land, and suppose also that among community development goals is utilization of some underemployed community resource, perhaps a group of unemployed workers in a certain set of occupations. The input-output model is used to simulate various alternative uses of the land, and among its many indicators, the impact of each use on the target occupations is examined. Alternative uses of existing resources, the impact of departing industries, the impacts of new industries—these are but a few of the policy issues addressed by a regional input-output model.