MyGTAP Data Program: A Program for Customizing and Extending the GTAP Database for Multiple Households, Split Factors, Remittances, Foreign Aid and Transfers

The GTAP standard model has proved a useful analysis tool and data source for over 20 years. The GTAP model has been updated overtime, but it maintains the structure of a single regional household, with income distributed into three components: government, private and savings-investment expenditures. There has been a need for a more detailed accounting system, especially as it relates to estimating the potential impacts of policies and global shocks on poverty, sustainable and inclusive growth. This paper (and its companion paper) present a method for splitting the GTAP regional household and linking these households to factor incomes and taxes. It introduces a user friendly GEMPACK based application, MyGTAP, for splitting the GTAP regional household based on basic data and splitting shares which may be obtained from a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM); this greatly reduces the development requirements for introducing multiple households into the GTAP model. The introduction of a split regional household (which does not require splitting data for every region) supports economic analysis based on detailed households, government, factor income, remittances, foreign aid and income transfers. The splitting method is based on the normalized GTAP database found in SplitCom, however, it is shown in the paper that this approach is easily reconciled and is consistent within a SAM framework. The code can be modified to include multiple split regions with unique household structures. This paper is a guide to employing the data tools and programs for splitting the regional household and factors of production in the GTAP database. It is intended to be used in tandem with a complimentary paper detailing the theory, accounting and model code "MyGTAP Model: A Model for Employing Data from the MyGTAP Data Program: Multiple Households, Split Factors, Remittances, Foreign Aid, and Transfer", GTAP Working Paper No. 78, by Walmsley and Minor 2013