AGRODEP TRAINS AFRICAN ECONOMISTS HOW TO BUILD AND UPDATE A SOCIAL ACCOUNTING MATRIX

The African Growth & Development Policy (AGRODEP) Modeling Consortium held its first training course on March 13-15, 2012 at the IFPRI WCAO in Dakar, Senegal.

The AGRODEP Modeling Consortium is an initiative lead by IPFRI and aiming at positioning African experts to take a leading role in the study of strategic development questions and the broader agricultural growth and policy debate facing African countries.

Twelve AGRODEP members from nine African countries attended the training course on "Building and Updating Social Accounting Matrices” (SAM).

Participants were introduced to the national accounts tables before reconciling them into a single framework: the SAM. The latter is the 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. Then, participants used a GAMS-based program to reconcile information into the SAM framework. They also learnt how to transform a SAM into an input-output table used by global CGE models.The course was conducted by Ismael Fofana, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at IFPRI and Network Coordinator of AGRODEP.