Indicators of the Kansas Economy: Assessment and Prototypes

Abstract

The Policy Research Institute at the University of Kansas agreed to perform a comprehensive assessment of the September 2005 Indicators of the Kansas Economy (IKE) structure and data, to design prototypes of programs to download data, to include in the prototype one indicator at the county level, and to develop a prototype web site to display those data dynamically.

The existing structure for IKE is a set of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents. Data are downloaded manually into the spreadsheets. Charts and data from the spreadsheets are then copied manually into the Word documents. The Word documents are then used to create an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file.

This arrangement works reasonably well for state level data. The procedure is somewhat vulnerable to errors such as the data being pasted into the wrong range in a spreadsheet and requires, as we understand it, a couple of days of labor each month. This process would not scale well to county level data though. There are over 600 counties in the seven states currently included in IKE. With monthly data, each variable in IKE involves over 100,000 data points when county level data are included.