Building an input-output Model for Buenos Aires City

Buenos Aires City (BAC) is the Argentina’s biggest city and the second largest metropolitan area in South America after Sao Paulo (Brazil). Assessing regional effects might be useful to take political or/and economic decisions, considering the dimension and the economic importance of Buenos Aires City. Taking into consideration the latter background information, the aim of this paper is to quantify the BAC’s interregional flows, evaluating direct and indirect regional effects with other regions of Argentina. At this regard, different levels of integration and dependence between BAC and the other regions country can be estimated applying and Interregional Input Output model. This is the first time a input-output matrix is constructed for Buenos Aires, which does not have a Regional Accounts System available. To tackle this problem, our model uses non-survey and calibration techniques. The paper focuses on the building process of that Input–Output Model and presents the estimations for intraregional and interregional tables. In particular, Argentina is separated in two regions, BAC and the rest of the country. The estimations to measure the Intraregional coefficients for each region are based on non-survey techniques, using Location Quotients (Simple Location Quotient, Cross Industry, Flegg’s Location Quotient and Augmented Flegg’s Location Quotient). Two common alternative ways to balance these matrices, the RAS and cross entropy methods are adapted to estimate the interregional coefficients.