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Policy Analysis

Advocate With Impact Using Public Policy Analysis Services From Regional Strategic, Ltd.

Policies created at the federal, state, and local levels have wide-ranging impacts. Those impacts can be difficult to understand on the surface at times. However, it’s essential for industry groups and local organizations to be aware of them as they push for positive changes in the communities they serve.

At Regional Strategic, Ltd., we’re experts in bringing order to the chaos of public policy impact data. Our team has delved into the impacts of COVID-19 policies, farm conservation practices, water quality, flooding, and more. Our expertise spans a wide range of industries and real-world experience, allowing us to conduct research that synthesizes both qualitative and quantitative information to produce a holistic picture of a policy’s effects.

Our goal is to partner with you to prepare strong, conclusive data that clearly shows policy impacts and outlines logical next steps so that you can advocate with confidence.

How We Perform Our Analysis

While economic impact analysis measures the financial consequences of a change in a specific area or industry, public policy analysis looks more broadly into the effects that legislation, administrative rules, and other policies have on the public.

When you work with Regional Strategic, Ltd., you’ll partner with a consultant group that’s adept at combining relevant quantitative data with in-depth qualitative analysis. Together, this data helps us come to a clear, actionable conclusion on the holistic impacts of the policy.

Our Policy Analysis Process:

  • Identify the specific policy or policy group of interest.
  • Define the event or policy change to be evaluated.
  • Map the effects of the event through economic, environmental, and social structures.
  • Estimate the value of mapped effects.
  • Finalize the project report and make any presentations included in the statement of work.

Our Projects

While it is regularly stated that politics and elections are a money game, it is often forgotten that the value of votes and representation vary widely across jurisdictions in the United States.

One-third of the population of the United States resides in the 35 lowest-population states and controls 70% of representation in the United States Senate. The remaining two-thirds control less than half this level of representation — only 30%. A senator from Wyoming represents fewer than 300,000 people. A senator from California represents nearly 19 million people. The result is that a Senate seat in Wyoming is worth 66 times the value of a Senate seat in California.

This is not just an issue within the Senate. A Congressional representative in Rhode Island represents only about half as many people as a Congressional representative in Montana, making a Rhode Island representative twice as valuable.

This continues to be true with respect to presidential electors as well. At the extreme, just 22% of the U.S. electorate, carrying 39 low-population states and the District of Columbia, could control the Electoral College and elect the president. In 11% of elections since 1873 and 40% of elections since 2000 the Electoral College winner and elected president did not win the popular nationwide vote.

In this situation, an economist would suspect that smart challenger money would find its way across state lines to finance winners in lower-cost, lower-population jurisdictions. In short, one would assume challenger money would move from high-population to low-population states.

The link below is to a paper analyzing the demographics involved in representational discrepancies. It also looks into the process and implications of reducing these discrepancies through means currently available. Data was sourced from the United States Congress, the U.S. Census, Ballotopedia.org, The Book of States, and several other sources.

As time allows, Regional Strategic, Ltd. is also looking into selected campaigns for national office to see if the hypothesis above, about the movement of challenger money to low-population jurisdictions, appears to be valid in the political marketplace.

In 2019, 107 employers were certified to utilize H-2A visas for temporary agricultural workers in Iowa. These employers were granted 4,108 visas, allowing them to utilize 2.7 million worker-hours of visa labor. This was roughly equivalent to 1,350 full-time equivalent H-2A visa employees in Iowa. Forty-four percent of these visa hours accrued to just three employers.

The average pay for these H-2A workers was $13.65 per hour. Exemption from social and employment security taxes provided the employers of this labor an estimated minimum employment expense subsidy of $3.43 per hour relative to domestic labor. The employment tax exemption also provides H-2A visa workers with a lower labor-force participation threshold than that faced by the residence workforce — effectively providing employers with an additional employment expense subsidy.

Fifty-six percent of H-2A visa labor in Iowa was approved for construction work. This construction is eligible for H-2A visas because it is engaged in erecting agricultural facilities on Iowa farms. Over half of the H-2A construction-hours are concentrated in two construction firms.

This information was all derived from visa certification databases maintained by the United States Department of Labor. The work was instigated by support work Regional Strategic, Ltd. did for attorneys engaged in labor relations issues within Iowa. Data is available nationwide for both H-2A and H-2B (temporary non-ag workers). There are substantial labor market policy issues involved in granting these visas and in the distribution and concentration of visas granted. Regional Strategic, Ltd. has an interest in expanding this work to a broader geography as time and resources allow.

During the spring across the Midwest, flooding is invariably a very expensive downstream issue. During the summer recreation season, nutrient pollution comes to the fore as a public nuisance and health hazard. These are the twin issues of agricultural runoff. The issues are a function of agricultural intensity and the prevalence of agricultural drainage infrastructure. Iowa is in the forefront of each of these conditions.

In 2018, Regional Strategic, Ltd. generated a series of six essays addressing these issues. The essays looked at farmer incentives with respect to runoff, how federal and state agricultural regulations affect these incentives and how they are operationalized, differences in passive and active water management practices, and the costs of implementing more active practices.

An interesting facet was the comparison of the costs of active runoff management with the downstream costs of flooding — both flood control and damage remediation. There is little doubt that if Iowa could invest its downstream costs of flooding in active upstream water management, flooding could become a minor issue within ten to twenty years. We simply lack the political will to reallocate these funds.

Data involved in this exercise was sourced from the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy and its periodical updates, the United States Geological Survey, the National Weather Service, and multiple other sources.

The essays were well received. Mark Imerman, Senior Consultant at Regional Strategic, Ltd., was asked to present to graduate students at the University of Iowa’s Hydroscience and Engineering Laboratory; water conferences in Iowa, South Dakota, and California; and a National Science Foundation-sponsored symposium at Iowa State University.

The link below leads to a directory of the six original essays, a summary presented at the National Science Foundation symposium, and a final essay on a common model-generated misconception regarding agricultural tiling and drainage flow in Iowa.

Most of us don’t ever think about livestock manure unless we can smell it. Then we just wish it would go away.

Ironically, when we can smell manure, it is going away. It is deteriorating. That smell is the result of volatile nitrogen (N), a valuable fertilizer, wafting away on the breeze. That smell results from the decomposition of energy-rich volatile solids and is evidence that methane, a potential energy resource and a potent greenhouse gas, is being lost to the atmosphere.

That smell is why we should think of manure as something other than a noxious waste. That smell might be the biggest single piece of low-hanging fruit on Iowa’s economic development tree. We ignore the potential, however, because we cannot get past that smell.

This is very important because Iowa livestock production generates 156 billion pounds of excrement annually. That gives Iowa a bigger poop profile than Tokyo, Paris, or New York City. The link below leads to four papers where Regional Strategic, Ltd. estimated the county-by-county production of livestock excrement within Iowa for pork, cattle, and poultry and then estimated the value that could be extracted from that excrement if Iowa effectively regulated its collection and processing. A further upside is that proper collection and processing would substantially reduce the smell of all this stuff, so we wouldn’t have to think about it quite so much.

Data for this effort was sourced from the U.S.D.A. National Agricultural Statistics Service, Iowa State University, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the Iowa Nutrient Reduction Strategy and its periodic updates, original surveys by Regional Strategic, Ltd., and multiple other sources.

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