Paper

2015 regionalized social accounting matrix for Tunisia: A nexus project SAM

Jebali, Belhassen, El Kadhi, Zouhair, Salhine, Rim Ben, Younes, Anis Ben, Raouf, Mariam

2020

Overview

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is an accounting framework that gives a quantitative overview of the structure of the economy over a given time period. It records all transactions between economic agents, while respecting the principles of circularity of flows and balance between revenues and expenditures for each account. The level of disaggregation of accounts in the matrix varies according to the analyses to be undertaken and data availability. The accounts in a national SAM generally are production activities, commodities, institutions, and factors of production. For economic analyses and planning, a more detailed SAM is constructed. These involve disaggregation of activities, households, and factors of production from the more general national SAM. In such matrices, the national economy often will also be disaggregated into sub-national regions. Such SAMs provide rich datasets to help decision-makers in developing, designing, and evaluating regional economic and investment policies. As part of the technical cooperation within the (Arab) Agricultural Investment Development Analyzer (AIDA) project, which aims to develop tools for planning and evaluating investment projects in the agricultural sector, the Institut Tunisien de la Compétitivité et des Etudes Quantitatives (ITCEQ – the Tunisian Institute of Competitiveness and Quantitative Studies), in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), have built a regionalized SAM of the Tunisian economy with detailed disaggregation at the sector, product, household, and regional levels. This SAM has been constructed using IFPRI's Nexus format, which uses common data standards, procedures, and classification systems for constructing and updating national SAMs. The regionalized SAM for Tunisia was built using national accounts statistics for the country, the Supply and Use Tables for 2015, which are produced by the National Institute of Statistics (NIS). The regionalized matrix is cons

• Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
• Subject: Social accounting