Using GIS as an Economic Development Tool
 

Introduction

Effective economic development strategies depend on answering many questions that are basically geographic in nature. For example,

  • What is the spatial pattern of businesses and households within a community?
  • Where are the best sites for a proposed industrial park?
  • Which retail sectors are underrepresented within a community?

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offer a powerful way to combine consumer and business data in a geographic framework to help answer such questions as these.  A GIS is a software database program that runs on personal computers.  The key feature of a GIS is that it links the spatial location of an object (e.g. a town, business, or county) with data and information that are associated with the object (e.g. the population, median income, and employment base of a county).  Any information that has a geographic location associated with it can be stored in a GIS and used to answer questions that have a geographical dimension.  For example, what is the spatial pattern of gas stations within an area?  What areas have the highest customer potential for a particular retail sector?  Where are the concentrations of high or low income households within a community?  How accessible is a particular location to key transportation routes?   Where is the optimal location for a new public health clinic?

GIS Training and Services

Introductory training workshops in using GIS are currently being developed jointly by personnel in the Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics Department and the Ohio State University Extension Community Development Program.  These workshops offer an introduction to GIS for OSU Extension personnel and others that have an interest in learning how to use GIS as a local economic development tool.  Participants receive hands-on computer training in how to get started in using a GIS and how to make maps that illustrate economic and demographic trends within their own Ohio community.  More advanced workshops that focus on using GIS as a spatial analysis tool in economic development are also planned.  A GIS program called Community 2020, which is distributed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, will be used in this workshop.   This package comes with a variety of Census variables (including 1990 data, 1997 estimates, and 2002 and 2007 projections) at the state, county, tract, and block group levels and can be purchased for $249 or $299 (depending on whether only regional data or data for the whole nation is purchased).  

For more information regarding these workshops, contact Elena Irwin, state specialist in regional and community economics and assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics.

Training workshops for OSU Extension personnel in using GIS for other applications (e.g. precision farming and land use planning) are currently being developed by the Extension GIS Team. 

Additional GIS Resources

Click here to check out the Community Economics Briefing on Using GIS as an Economic Development Tool.

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Updated 06/09/06 by Elena Irwin