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Columns::April 15, 2002
Two-day statewide symposium highlights undergraduate research
Magazine ranks business, law, education among nation’s best
Four candidates for deanship to visit campus
Annual children’s literature conference opens April 18
Charleston mayor to discuss downtown preservation
Team-building ‘eggs-cellence’
Testing the waters
Making media a method
Teaching students is ‘elementary’ for mathematics education prof
Rick Watson, MIS professor, named Internet Strategy chairholder
Newsmakers
In the swim
Campus News
The Golden Arch
Selig Center study: University’s economic impact on Athens area approaches $2 billion per year
By Jim Kvicala
jimkvicala@terry.uga.edu
Well over $1 billion a year flows into the Athens-area economy from the budgets and checkbooks of the University of Georgia,
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its employees and its students, according to a recently completed study by the university’s Terry College of Business.
That study, conducted by the Terry College’s Selig Center for Economic Growth, shows the Athens economy and UGA are bound together more closely than ever. In 1998, more than 20 percent of the jobs held by local residents owed their existence directly to UGA-related spending. Today, it’s about 30 percent, according to Selig Center Director Jeffrey M. Humphreys, who carried out the study.
The study included UGA spending in fiscal year 2001 on salaries and fringe benefits paid to Athens residents, operating supplies and expenses and other budgeted expenditures, spending on construction projects and money spent locally by students.
Humphreys says UGA, its employees and its students pumped $1.128 billion last year into the Athens-area economy, but the actual economic impact was much closer to $2 billion. Humphreys’s study determined that every $1 spent locally generated an additional 56 cents for the local economy.
Furthermore, the study doesn’t take into account the economic impact of tourism or the money spent in Athens by sports fans attending athletic events throughout the year--or even money spent by parents visiting students. Also left out of the equation is much of the money in UGA’s travel budgets, since that money is spent outside the Athens area.
“We didn’t include money spent by visitors who come here because of the university,” Humphreys says. “We only included capital projects and student and employee spending.” To track other kinds of income and spending would have required surveys to acquire more data, making the study more costly and complicated to conduct, he says.
To calculate the economic impact of each dollar spent as accurately as possible, Humphreys uses common statistical devices called multipliers. Starting from initial expenditures, a multiplier traces the flow of re-spending that occurs locally and tallies that re-spending repeatedly until the money has left the local economy completely. For accuracy, Humphreys adjusts some of the multipliers from year to year to account for inflation.
The economic impact study defined the Athens area as including Clarke, Oconee, Barrow, Jackson, Madison and Oglethorpe counties. Humphreys says limiting the study area to what in the past was considered the Athens metro area would have ignored the large numbers of students and UGA employees who now live in those areas. “It was just common sense,” he says.
Calculating all the benefits and costs of the University of Georgia’s presence in the Athens area would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, Humphreys says. Long-term benefits to the Athens community as a result of UGA’s presence include such intangibles as cultural opportunities, intellectual stimulation and volunteer work, plus the positive effects of UGA’s intellectual capital resources.
The study also does not take into account the costs to the local community resulting from the presence of a tax-exempt university and the services local governments must provide to support it, its employees and its students.
The study was sponsored by Georgia’s Intellectual Capital Partnership Program, the Simon S. Selig Jr. Center for Economic Growth and the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia.
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