Social Accounting Matrix

Social Accounting Matrix#

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is the benchmark accounting system from which a CGE model is calibrated.

A SAM records payments between economic accounts such as:

  • commodities or activities;

  • factors of production;

  • households;

  • government;

  • taxes;

  • investment or saving; and

  • the rest of the world.

For a balanced SAM, each account’s total receipts equal its total payments.

CGE-Core uses benchmark flows to recover model parameters such as expenditure shares, factor shares, input coefficients, tax rates and saving rates. The calibrated model should reproduce the benchmark data before a policy shock is applied.

CGE-Core’s sam utilities can build a model data directory from a single SAM CSV.

See Loading your own SAM for a worked example.