Decomposing the Economic Footprint of a Megaport: Direct, Indirect, and Induced Impacts of the Port of Vancouver in 2021

The article is a journal-style research note that uses the Port of Vancouver’s published 2021 Economic Impact Study (executive summary) as a structured dataset and then decomposes the port’s reported economic footprint into direct, indirect, and induced components for both British Columbia and Canada. It reproduces the key tables (jobs/FTEs, wages, GDP, and output), calculates simple derived metrics—especially the share and scale of induced impacts and the implied “outside B.C.” residual—and uses these to clarify what “total impacts” mean in an input–output framework. The paper then adds transaction cost economics (TCE) as an interpretive methods overlay, framing the port as a governance system coordinating high-specificity, time-sensitive transactions under uncertainty, and explaining why the induced (household-spending) layer is a material part of the measured footprint.