Compilation of Social Accounting Matrices with a Detailed Representation of the Agricultural Sector (AgroSAM)

Social accounting matrices (SAM) are a convenient way to represent the monetary flows between productive sectors and institutions and may serve as database for a large variety of quantitative tools used for economic analysis. The aim of this study is to construct consistent and complete SAMs for the EU27 Member States with a highly disaggregated agricultural sector, which should serve as a consistent database for quantitative policy analysis within and beyond the agricultural sector. The main challenge here was the integration of information from different data sources in several steps: (1) compilation of supply and use-tables as well as data about monetary flows between institutions into a SAM format, (2) disaggregation of the agricultural and food-sector by using input data from the agricultural sector model CAPRI, and (3) sequential cross-entropy estimations of the final SAMs in order to map different databases and missing information. The estimation steps were designed in a way that the final representation of the agricultural sector agrees with the corresponding macro-total while maintaining the core information provided by the CAPRI database. This resulting database is meant as a contribution to existing tools for quantitative policy analysis built on SAMs, like for example computable general equilibrium models. For this reason, we have chosen a sectoral classification that is mostly compatible with the format of the GTAP database in order to facilitate its potential use also in a GTAP framework. Moreover, the tool is also flexible to match different product aggregations and feed partial equilibrium models (e.g. agricultural, forestry or energy models)