Economic meeting set on March 18

A major new tool for economic development and policy analysis will be presented at the March 18-19 “Planning for the CNMI’s Economic Future” conference at the Hyatt Regency on Saipan.

According to Conference steering Committee, the economic model will give the CNMI, for the first time, a means of evaluating possible economic development directions and government policy alternatives.

Rep. Manuel Tenorio pointed out that concerns about federal policy alternatives and their impacts on the CNMI go back at least to the Covenant negotiations. The Covenant refers to the manner and extent to which federal laws should apply in the CNMI. It refers to the potential effects of each federal law on local conditions within the CNMI. It provides for federal assistance to help the CNMI in achieving a progressively higher standard of living for its people as part of the American economic community.

Rep. Karl T. Reyes stated that to this day there are many unanswered question about the economic impacts of alternative development directions and government polices. The reason is that economic impact analysis is very difficult work. It requires good data and complex analytical tools. The CNMI has been improving its data collection and processing capability for several years. There is now sufficient data to construct a model to help answers some of the difficult development and policy questions.

Rep. Oscar Babauta said that the model construction itself was an excellent collaboration between the CNMI Department of Commerce, Central Statistics Division and Dr. Richard Conway.

The new CNMI economic model will be demonstrated at the conference. First, it will demonstrate how the CNMI’s economy operates, the importance of such basic sectors as tourism, apparel and federal expenditures. It will demonstrate how these basic sectors drive the rest of the economy including the government.

Second, it will trace the economy’s growth and development since 1980 and now this growth has affected the CNMI’s employment, population and per capita income over the years.

Third, it will show how these three basic sectors affect employment and business growth throughout the entire economy through the multiplier process.

These are just the few of the applications of the CNMI economic model. There can be more in the future. The important point is that it has capability to gauge the potential effects of a variety of development directions and policy alternatives.