Mariam Raouf - IFPRI Egypt
In the context of the Agricultural (Arab) Investment Development Analyzer (AIDA) project, IFPRI is collaborating with the Institut Tunisien de la Competitivité et Etudes Quantitatives (ITCEQ) and Société MEDEVA to jointly construct a new regionalized social accounting matrix (SAM) for Tunisia by conducting a series of training sessions. The first workshop which was held in October 2018 presented IFPRI’s Nexus SAM construction files to the ITCEQ team. The second workshop, that was held during 2nd -5th April 2019, deepened the knowledge and use of the Nexus SAM, by working closely with a group of 5 participants from the ITCEQ in compiling all the relevant interlinked sheets for the Nexus SAM construction files.
The highly detailed regional SAM will include the disaggregation of activities, household and factor income groups into seven sub-national regions. The household groups will be also separated into rural vs. urban areas, and the labor factor will be differentiated by four types of education levels.
First, the macro SAM was jointly estimated using the data from the national accounts statistics and the Supply and Use Tables (SUT) for 2015 that were published by the Institut National de Statistiques (INS). Export and import shares were compiled from UN COMTRADE Statistics and the Balance of Payments data were extracted from the IMF Balance of Payments Statistics (BOP). The government data were also extracted from the IMF Government Fiscal Statistics (GFS) 2014 data. The information on the production and prices of the disaggregated agricultural commodities were provided from the FAOSTAT. The ITCEQ team has estimated the agricultural input coefficients, i.e, the cost structure of the disaggregated agricultural activities using the “Annuaire des Statistiques Agricoles” for 2015, that was published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Water Resources and Fishery.
The team has then compiled two new supply and use (SUT) tables following the NEXUS’ activities and commodities classification. The new SUT together with the macro SAM were then combined using cross entropy methods to derive the balanced National SAM for Tunisia for 2015.
To construct the Household SAM, the ITCEQ has collaborated with the INS to prepare detailed household expenditure statistics for 15 representative household groups. Households were split according to 5 (expenditure) quintiles as rural farm, rural non-farm and urban households, based on the data from the Household Expenditure survey for 2015. As the household survey for Tunisia does not provide sufficient data on incomes, the team also relied on the Tunisian Labor Force Panel Survey (TLMPS) to estimate the factor income payments to household as well as the factor income generation by activities. Work on the regional disaggregation is ongoing by using information from the agricultural activities. The team collected data from the Agricultural Statistics Yearbook, by commodities and by governorates for the following indicators: production in tons, yields, areas, and prices. The disaggregation of the industrial and services activities was also implemented based on the indicators that were provided by the survey of the private enterprises.
The next step will be for the team to finalize and document the Regional SAM for Tunisia by the end of May 2019. The SAM and its documentation will be published on IFPRI’s website and is expected to be widely used by policy analyst and researchers. It will also constitute the main database for the AIDA model, an offline and online computable general equilibrium model (CGE) built by IFPRI. AIDA is funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the CGIAR Policies, Institutions and Markets (PIM) program.
