user2016

The impact of imports and technological change on domestic employment is a long-term and ongoing topic for academic and government research, and discussion in the popular media[1][2].nnThe U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes a current and historical Employment Requirements Matrix (ERM), which details the employment generated directly and indirectly across all industries by a million dollars production of a given industry's primary product[3]. The BLS data can give an indication of the relative impact of different industries' primary production, and is broken down by years (1997-2014), over 200 sectors, and by domestic-only versus total production including imports. The ERM is often used in research as a component of general Leontief Input-Ouput models, and external sources of economic data for final demand.[4] R, with it's support for input-output modelling and general matrix operations, is well-suited to research in this area[5][6].nnThe package rempreq includes both the current and historic tables, for total production and domestic production only. It also includes functions for accessing any particular year (or years), selecting industries, and for including domestic versus total output. These can be used to conveniently generate estimated time series for the employment impact for various types of production, the impact of imports on employment, and investigate changes in the technological structure of industries related to employment in those industries over time.nnThis presentation will include an introduction to rempreq, sample demonstrations of its use, and future plans for the extension of the package.