Output Accounting Applied in a Small Area

Economic geography on the regional or local scale suffers from a scarcity of figures which relate to localities rather than to industrial or commercial units, and also from a lack of figures expressed in money. To some extent, these two inadequacies are aspects of a single problem, since figures in money terms alone are versatile enough to enable quantities expressed in a wide range of units to be added together, as they must be to create relevance to a territorial unit. The usual way out of this difficulty is through the use of figures for labour input, which have the important merit of accessibility at various levels including that of detailed field collection; but this method has weaknesses which are concentrated in the quite wide range of outputs per person employed in the various industries.1 In theory, the best way out of the difficulty is obviously the adoption of the 'value added' concept which is the foundation of standard national accounting. There are, however, practical difficulties in its application in a detailed study of a small area, of which by far the most important is the real andjustified reluctance of businessmen and others to reveal their costs and profits in adequate detail. This paper presents the results of an experiment in making assessments of 'value added' property by property without asking people about their affairs. As the maps show, detailed figures have been found for net outputs2 for an area of about two hundred acres in the inner suburbs of Leeds

Business · Economics · Accounting · Housing Market and Economics · Spatial and Panel Data Analysis