Socio-economic impacts 1: Overview and economic impacts

Major projects can have a wide range of impacts on a locality – including biophysical and socio-economic – and the trade-off between such impacts is often crucial in decision-making. This chapter begins with an initial overview of the socio-economic impacts of projects/developments, which explains the nature of such impacts. It explores the evolving story, covering issues of definition and semantics surrounding terms such as 'socio-economic impact assessment' and 'social impact assessment'. Economic impacts, including the direct employment impacts and the wider, indirect impacts on a local and regional economy, are then discussed in more detail. The chapter draws in part on the work of the Impacts Assessment Unit (IAU) in the School of Planning at Oxford Brookes University, which has undertaken many research and consultancy studies on the socio-economic impacts of major projects. The early recognition, by some analysts, of the importance of socio-economic impacts in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process was partly reflected in legislation.