Estimating A Residence-Employment Distribution: An Application Of The Double-Constrained Gravity Model

Abstract

A complex problem in socio-economic planning deals with the measurement of the interaction between zones or activity regions. This problem has received considerable attention in transportation, planning, economics and geography, and several types of analytical models have been developed. Several models are inspired by the assumption that the socio-economic forces governing the urban spatial location process behave in analogous ways to the physical interaction of bodies as described by Newton’s gravitational law.

In this work, a double constrained gravity model was used to estimate the interaction between geo-political zones due to resident labor population and employment opportunities. The work is part of a larger project which attempts to evaluate different industrial development strategies for the southwestern part of Puerto Rico.