The availability of comprehensive and coherent socio-economic data is an essential requirement for the development, implementation, and assessment of any national strategic plan, like Egypt’s Sustainable Development Strategy 2030. Social accounting matrices (SAMs) combine many datasets produced by statistical agencies and national institutions – such as Central Banks and Ministries of Finance and Agriculture – including those on balance of payments, government budgets, national accounts, and household surveys. As such, SAMs are very comprehensive and provide the basis for policy analysis that focuses on the economy-wide and distributional implications of public policies and investments. An additional benefit of SAMs lies in the construction process itself, which requires the reconciliation of data from different sources and the discovery of existing data gaps and weaknesses.
The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) is pleased to present a disaggregated version of the Egypt SAM for 2010/11. This new SAM builds on the previous SAM 2010/11 built and published by CAPMAS with the support of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The value added of this new disaggregated version of the SAM is its focus on the agricultural sector and different types of households. By disaggregating the single agricultural sector into 22 agricultural sub-sectors and the single household of the previous SAM into 20 household groups, defined by expenditure decile and rural or urban residence, the disaggregated SAM now allows for analyzing agricultural issues at the detailed crop level and to better understand the potential impacts of policy changes for both better off and more vulnerable households.
As such, the disaggregated SAM provides a rich dataset on the economy for economic analysts and researchers in their quest to provide evidence-based policy analysis to decision makers. It is my hope that this new SAM will be widely used and results based on this SAM will help to inform policies in Egypt to improve the lives of the people. This disaggregated SAM is a product of the continuing CAPMAS-IFPRI collaboration. I would like to thank IFPRI for the technical support it provides to CAPMAS, especially that provided by Ms. Perrihan Al-Riffai and Dr. Clemens Breisinger. We acknowledge the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions and Markets for its financial support towards the capacity building sessions. CAPMAS looks forward to receiving feedback and comments on the disaggregated SAM from those interested in economic and financial studies, especially studies that may contribute to improving and building upon this body of work. The disaggregated SAM for Egypt for 2010/11 shall be accessible to all interested users online through the official websites of both CAPMAS and IFPRI.
Major-General Abo Bakr El-Gendy President of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics
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