The ARCADIA Employment Model

Duncan Smith, Camilo-Vargas Ruiz and myself (Mike Batty) have completed the employment model for the Arcadia Integrated Assessment Model. The model is unique in that it is built at the regional level for three UK regions – London, the South East and East at the level of wards – some 3202 in all, which dovetails it with Cambridge Econometrics Input –Output Model MDME3 and thus provides employment in size sectors at the fine scale for the Land Use Transportation Interaction (LUTI) Model which covers the GLA and Outer Metropolitan Area. These nested regions with the GLA shown in Black are illustrated below.

We have written a working paper on the model and this is available from the CASA web site and from

http://www.complexcity.info/working-papers/

The paper covers the development of the regression model which is organised in two stages: first the prediction of floorspace for commercial, office and industrial sectors from a variety of independent variables such as land area, other floorspace and so on, and then the prediction of each of six types of employment as a function largely of floorspace and accessibility. The explanations are robust and reasonable explaining over 70 percent of the variance of each employment type. In the paper, we show how the model can be integrated as the interface between the I-O and LUTI models, focusing on how we deal with increments and decrements of employment in a comparative static framework.