Construction of Social Accounting Matrices for the EU-27 with a Disaggregated Agricultural Sector (AgroSAM)

This technical report provides an overview on the AgroSAM project carried out at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS). The objective was to create a set of Social Accounting Matrices with a disaggregated agricultural sector for the 27 EU Member States by combining national Supply and Use Tables with data from the agricultural sector model CAPRI. In general, three stages of can be distinguished: First, the compilation of consolidated macroeconomic indicators for EU-27. Second, the combination of different datasets from EuroStat into a set of Social Accounting Matrices with aggregated agricultural and food-industry sectors. Third, the disaggregation of these sectors based on CAPRI data. The methods applied for the balancing of the datasets at the three stages draw heavily on the concept of Cross Entropy estimation. Particularly the structural deviations of agricultural sector and economy-wide data created a need to specify in which cases comparatively large deviations from recorded agricultural data could be tolerated, and in which cases not. For this purpose, Cross Entropy procedures proved to be extremely useful. The finally estimated AgroSAM are a first step into the direction of creating a harmonized database for agricultural policy analysis within the Modelling Platform iMAP hosted at IPTS.