Development of a Truck Border Crossing Delays and Disruptions Economic Impact Assessment Model

Issue: During 2019, more than six million trucks crossed from Mexico into the United States through land border crossings, handling goods that are important inputs to U.S. manufacturing and for personal consumption. The truck border crossing process is a constant, complicated, extremely high volume means of international trade involving multiple stakeholders, and border wait times have large economic impacts.

Objective: Current available border wait time information, from a radio frequency identification (RFID)-based system developed by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) is useful for planning and operations and could be used to analyze the economic impact of truck border crossing delays and disruptions to the U.S. economy.

Outcome: The Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense (CBTS) Center of Excellence has partnered with TTI to provide a practical and simple but powerful tool to help in performing economic impact analyses on border crossing changes. This tool will be scalable in terms of geography and performance measures.  The approach consists of developing and comparing baseline crossing and alternative scenarios, using an input/output model that takes into account available commodity specific flows, proportions, and valuations. These comparisons will look at estimating changes in travel costs and savings, which will be applied to regional factors that proportionally expand or translate the effect to produce labor, wage, and business production economic outputs. The tool incorporates data from IMPLAN Pro, an economic impact assessment model that uses the standard input-out (IO) modeling technique. 

Value Proposition: The economic impact assessment tool will help DHS Customs and Border Protection, policymakers and other stakeholders measure and quantify the economic impacts that regular delays or unexpected events cause when disrupting the regular operations of the border crossing process. This will also help in identifying and prioritizing actions to prevent or dampen undesired economic impacts.