Economic Benchmarking & Planning
Strategic economic development planning is an important part of overall municipal sustainability planning.
Our services include:
- In-depth Economic Base Analysis: A sound economic base analysis is the foundation for strategic economic development planning. Our approach starts with an objective assessment of a community’s economic position. This includes a review of demographic trends; human resources including the age distribution, education, and skills levels of the labour force; employment, sector concentrations and growth/decline; match between labour force skills and available jobs; and locational characteristics taking into account key site selection factors that are considered in investment decisions.
- Investment Readiness Assessment and Benchmarking: Another key component of our strategic economic planning practice area includes an objective assessment of a community’s offer, competitiveness, and readiness to attract new investment. This includes assessing where communities stand relative to their competition through benchmarking the community against other competitive communities on key economic variables.
- Sustainable Economic Development Strategies: Building on the findings of objective economic base analysis and investment readiness assessment and benchmarking, as well as stakeholder and opportunity analysis, we then prepare economic development strategies which are tailored for each community and provide realistic goals and objective, strategies and action plans to assist communities in strengthening their economies, support entrepreneurship, and attract new investment, focusing on sectors that are sustainable for long term economic growth.
