Many economic and societal interactions defy conventional statistics owing to their cross-cutting nature. In particular tourism, transport and environmental issues can be problematic as their activities involve many disparate industries. These complex interactions challenge existing classification systems making it very difficult to assess their impact on economies and societies. To address this short coming, satellite accounts have been developed. Often however, examining these phenomena at the state level is not satisfactory, as these activities are place-centric.

The growing demand for cross-cutting statistics, such as those articulated by Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi will inevitably lead to a greater emphasis on sub-national or regional data. Regional Input-Output and Social Accounting Matrices will require improved information on inter-regional trade flows. The lack of this type of data has retarded the capacity to construct sound regional economic models and provide a robust evidence base with which to formulate and assess regional policy.

Estimating and validating inter-regional trade flows is not straight forward. This paper uses the Supply and Use framework to test the plausibility of trade flow estimates at product and industry level. The SUT provide maxima and minima for each product-industry transaction, which can be used to test and constrain flow estimates. Using Irish data from 2005, inter-regional trade flows are estimated, tested and refined for the NUTS 2 regions.

Keywords: Regional; Supply and Use; Trade flows; Ireland

Biography: Steve MacFeely is Director of Business Statistics and Innovation at the Central Statistics Office in Ireland. As Director of Business Statistics he is responsible for the compilation and dissemination of all enterprise related statistics and agriculture, price, transport and tourism statistics. His role as Director for Innovation gives him for responsibility for systems and methodological development, quality assurance and issues relating to the development of administrative data. He has published a number of papers relating to tourism, enterprise productivity, national accounts and communications.