How to Measure Economic Impacts

Economic impact is never contained to one city or town, and any film project will have impacts beyond the immediate city, town or region. Measuring impact is an attempt to estimate the spending that occurs because of the production.

There are many things to measure, including:

Jobs: Ask yourself how many jobs a production has created during the course of the project
• GDP (Gross Domestic Product): Review the GDP, which is the sum of wages, income and profit brought to an area
• Wages and Salaries: Review aggregate wages and salaries. What is the personal benefit as the industry grows?
• Wealth brought to a community: Look at the increase in property values (i.e., small communities might see an upswing in home buying, or an influx of buyers, vacationers, tourists because of the film’s location). What wealth was generated as a result?

If you are unable to gather the production expenditures or other data from a production, AFCI has a Location Production Expenditure Report form which can be used to come up with an estimate.

The AFCI feels it is important to report actual money spent by the production. Communities and government agencies may choose to report both the actual spend data as well as additional economic impact data such as local/regional multipliers to their individual jurisdictions. Jurisdictions having incentive programs often require economic impact data and design their incentive program rules that require production to report information in order to obtain an incentive. Productions can be required to share expenditure data to receive the incentive.