GIS Education Center

What has happened to make GIS the essential tool for economic development analysis?

Simply put, more data are available and more sophisticated techniques are available to analyze the data.  In this workshop you will learn how GIS is essential to economic development analysis; we believe that all meaningful economic development analysis now will involve some GIS methods and tools. You will see how GIS is a tool that promotes collaboration across people with diverse expertise and is a powerful tool for community outreach and support. 

Workshop Session Learning Objectives:

• The juxtaposition of two themes: problems and methods. The workshop focuses on the “cusp” between the initiated and the uninitiated – people who have problems to solve, but are not aware of all the tools that are available to solve those problems.

• Provide a broad overview of economic development analysis and GIS tools and methods used to carry out economic development analysis.

• Demonstrate applications of GIS to economic development analysis and have students execute examples of these applications in ArcGIS 10.

Topics Include:

• Site Selection
• Zoning
• Fiscal Impacts
• GIS tools to measure concentration (ie hotspot analysis)
• What are common economic development polices that would benefit from GIS-based analysis?
• How were economic development policies analyzed before GIS?  What has changed?
• Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) within GIS for economic development analysis
• Applications of regression beyond OLS
• Raster Analysis in GIS

• Site selection
• Zoning
• Fiscal impacts
• Externalities

• The best practices of GIS

• ArcCatalog to preview/manage data
• Use file geodatabases, not shapefiles
• Geoprocessing and ModelBuilder
• Understanding differences between raster and vector data

• Important GIS tools:

• Table Join
• Spatial Join
• Geocoding
• Selection by attributes
• Symbolizing quantitative data
• Buffering features
• Intersecting features

• How are industries categorized using NAICS codes?
• What is an “index”?  Examples of economic concentration indexes

• Using GIS tools to measure concentration

• Standard Distance
• Average Nearest Neighbor
• Global Moran’s I
• Global Hotspot Analysis

• What is “regression”?
• What are common economic development polices that would benefit from GIS-based analysis?
• How were economic development policies analyzed before GIS?  What has changed?
• Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) within GIS for economic development analysis
• Applications of regression beyond OLS
• Raster Analysis in GIS

(2) Students need to possess an intermediate-level knowledge of the Windows XP operating system. This includes creating new files and folders, copy and paste, transferring data between computers using a flash drive, and other basic desktop functionality. Familiarity with creating and managing new worksheets in Excel and working with a wide range of file types (e.g. TXT, CSV, XLS) is helpful but not required.

(3) Additional skills expected: storing, copying and management of multiple data types; managing multiple windows and applications; and the discipline to save work frequently.

(4) A strong motivation to learn, explore and have fun with computer applications is essential.  This workshop will require a significant amount of independent work and relies heavily on student initiative.

(5) An openness to working with other students in the class as a shared learning experience in order to complete assignments, build contacts in the professional GIS world and to support relatively new GIS learners.

Organization
The structure of each class will generally consist of a short lecture followed by 2 - 2.5 hours of hands-on lab time and a short break halfway through the class period. Homework, quizzes, and readings are assigned in order to reinforce GIS concepts and techniques.

Textbook
No textbook is required for this workshop.