Course Description
Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are widely used to analyze the impact of shocks and policies. They are operationalized through the calibration procedure which consists in finding models’ parameters that permit to reproduce the benchmark situation given by the Social Accounting Matrix (SAM).
The SAM is the presentation of the national accounts in a condensed matrix. It is a consistent quantitative macroeconomic data framework representing the flows between different sectors and institutional units within an economy during a given period of time, in general, one year.
The choice of the initial conditions of the economy is an important step of the analysis. In a case in which the SAM no longer reflects the initial conditions of the economy at the time the study is undertaken (either through being too old or due to the occurrence of a major shock) and there is no time to build a new SAM, the update of the original SAM can be a solution.
This training provided concise information on the building of a SAM from national accounts tables and the updating of a SAM with more recent data. Participants also learned how to transform a SAM into an input-output table used by global CGE models (e.g. GTAP or MIRAGE models).
Program
Tuesday March 13, 2012
Introduction and general discussion on SAMs
Structure of a standard SAMs
Steps to build up a SAM
- From the national accounts tables to a standard SAM
- Adjusting a standard SAM
Wednesday March 14, 2012
Steps to build up a SAM (continue)
- Disaggregating the factor accounts
- Disaggregating the household accounts
- The inter-institutional transfer accounts
Other issues (financial accounts, satellite accounts of domestic and leisure time, etc.)
Thursday March 15, 2012
Why do we need to update a SAM?
Steps to update a SAM
Checking the consistency of the updated SAM
From SAM to a GTAP IO-table
About the Trainer:
Ismaël FOFANA
Economist & Agricultural Economist
Senior Research Staff, International Food Policy Research Institute
Address: Lot No 2 - Titre 3396, BP 24063 Dakar Almadies, Dakar, Senegal
Tel.: +221 33 869 9800 - Fax: +221 33 869 9841
Email: I.Fofana@cgiar.org / Foissam@hotmail.com
Web sites: https://sites.google.com/site/ismafofana / www.ifpri.org / www.agrodep.org
Ismaël Fofana is a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Manager of the West and Central Africa Office in Dakar, Senegal. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne in France. He worked between 2003 and 2010 as a research professional for the Poverty and Economic Policy network at Laval University in Canada. His research work is mainly focused on the development of frameworks used to assess the macro-micro links of public policies and external shocks in such a way that issues of growth, poverty, and equity are better understood. He has more than eight years of experience in developing Social Accounting Matrices and Computable General Equilibrium simulation models.
Training materials
- The overview of the training course : It describes the agenda of the training course, all sessions (overview, reading materials, and requirements), pre-activity for participants, and the presentations in each section.