THE ROLE OF ERROR STRUCTURE IN SIMULATIONS ON REGIONAL INPUT‐OUTPUT ANALYSIS*

Previous simulation experiments on regional input-output analysis have concluded that regional purchase coefficients are more important than technical coefficients in contributing to multiplier accuracy. This paper shows that the multiplicative error structure used in those experiments may have biased the results. A new error structure, combining a multiplicative and an additive component is introduced, and simulations are conducted on randomly generated models. The analysis shows that the results are sensitive to the relative magnitudes of the two error components, as well as to the closure of the model.