A new data sharing agreement will improve Northern Tasmanian councils’ ability to assess the profitability of new projects and events.
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The Northern Tasmania Development Corporation unveiled its new regional economic model on Tuesday, making demographics data and economic modelling available to the seven Northern councils.
By accessing the NTDC's data, councils will be able to identify factors such as unemployment, employment by sector and construction activity for each municipality.
“We can feed in key information to the economic impact model to determine what the true economic value of a project will deliver to the region and to each council area,” NTDC chief executive Maree Tetlow said.
“For example, we can interrogate how many businesses there are in each council area, what sector they operate in and how many jobs are based in those sectors.
“There is also an event impact model that will help event organisers determine the value of their events to the community from an economic and jobs perspective.”
The NTDC brokered the deal to provide access to seven councils, however the City of Launceston has already used the model for a range of measures over the past several years.
The council’s senior economic adviser Bruce Williams said the program could be used to implement more effective social welfare and community programs.
“If you’re doing work in the Northern suburbs and you know there are some pockets of disadvantage, you can get very powerful analysis to know exactly where those pockets are,” he said.
“You can find out what the level of education is, what the economic situation is and then you can devise programs around that.”
Ms Tetlow also indicated the program was available to the private sector and general public.
All of the data collated for the program comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census and National Institute of Economic and Industry Research.