Structural Change in a Metropolitan Economy: The Chicago Region 1975–2011

The vast majority of studies addressing issues of the impacts of innovation diffusion or structural change adopt an approach that focuses on one particular sector. In this chapter, a very different approach is used. Firstly, the focus is on a regional economy and therefore a set of interdependent sectors. Secondly, the analysis looks backwards from a forecast horizon in an attempt to explore the types of changes that have been predicted in the structure of this set of sectors. The empirical base will be a set of over 30 annual regional input-output tables for the Chicago region (encompassing both an historical and a forecast period) that have been extracted from a general equilibrium model of the region’s economy. The exploration of changes in the economy will involve consideration of three approaches to the detective work necessary to uncover what has happened.