 UOG PCEI Releases Report on Buy Local Guam Initiative
For Immediate Release December 27, 2012 For more information contact: Dr. Maria Claret Ruane UOG Professor of Economics Email: ruanemcm@yahoo.com
UOG PCEI Releases Report on Buy Local Guam Initiative The University of Guam’s Pacific Center for Economic Initiatives (PCEI) is pleased to release its 17th technical report entitled The Buy Local Initiative on Guam and Its Effectiveness,authored by its resident development economist and UOG Professor of Economics, Dr. Maria Claret Ruane. More than one year since the Buy Local initiative on Guam embarked on its educational campaign which received funding from the Department of the Interior Office of Insular Affairs, there has been interest on whether the campaign and initiative have had an effect on local residents’ awareness of Buy Local, as well as the perception of the initiative’s importance to our island economy and more importantly, whether the initiative has changed the behavior of local residents in terms of shifting purchases toward local sources and away from the “Three O’s”: on-base, online and off-island. According to UOG PCEI’s Project Director and Dean of the School of Business and Public Administration, Dr. Anita Borja Enriquez, the data revealed that the Buy Local campaign has been effective since it was first launched at John Bernardo’s Dragonfruit Farm in Ordot on October 19, 2011. Based on the responses of 435 participants in a face-to-face survey conducted in November, the study found the following: · media channels such as radio and TV as well as word-of-mouth (as expected in a small community like Guam) have been the means by which most survey respondents first learned about “Buy Local”; · as expected, local residents have attached different meanings to the phrase “Buy Local” or, more importantly, the term “local”, that this challenge is not germane to the Buy Local initiative but has reflected itself in broader discussions (including those related to the military build-up) and will continue to be a challenge in the future in discussions affecting our island community; · the Buy Local campaign has been effective one year since its marketing/educational campaign, as reflected in increasing local residents’ o awareness of buying local (one year later, 83.29% of respondents are aware of Buy Local); o understanding the importance of buying local to our island community (one year later, 93.78% of respondents think buying local is important to our island); o support of the initiative (one year later, 87.10% of respondents are supportive of buying local); and o more importantly, in affecting local residents’ spending behavior by shifting their purchases toward local businesses (one year later, 90.60% of respondents indicated that they now purchase more from local vendors instead of the military base, online source, or shopping during their off-island trips, with 58.07% purchasing at least 41% more from local vendors than one year ago); and · the top reasons to support buying local are to o keep the dollars circulating/multiplying in the local economy (23.08% responses); o create local jobs (18.03% responses); and o increase local tax revenues (13.68% responses). Please see the attached file for the PCEI report on the Buy Local initiative on Guam. The PCEI Report can also be downloaded at: http://sdrv.ms/10kByuM.
About Pacific Center for Economic Initiatives The University of Guam Pacific Center for Economic Initiatives (UOG PCEI) is a regional project funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration (EDA). It intends to help build local entrepreneurship capacity and local information resource capacity, as part of its comprehensive approach towards entrepreneurship and economic development in the regional areas of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Guam, the Republic of Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). |
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