Disaggregating Agro-Food Sectors in the GTAP Data Base

We discuss the construction of the GTAP-AGROFOOD database for CGE modelling which is consistent with the standard GTAP Data Base Version 10a (Aguiar et al. 2019). GTAP-AGROFOOD departs from the full detail of 141 regions, 65 products and 8 factors in GTAP, by introducing 51 additional agro-food products and sectors in lieu of 11 original GTAP agrofood products, thereby yielding a database with 105 products. Such additional detail can improve and enrich, for instance, analysis of trade, bio-economy or climate change mitigation or adaptation issues. It also eases linkage to other, more detailed data sets, such as for nutrition accounting or irrigation water use. The main data sources used are the FABIO Multi-Regional Input-Output Database (Bruckner et al. 2019) which reports on production, land, seed, feed, and food use, mainly for primary agricultural products, and market balances for dairy products from FAOSTAT. They are combined with TASTE V10a (Pelikan et al. 2020) which provides bilateral trade and tariffs revenues at the level of tariff lines. The balancing methodology which ensures consistency with the GTAP Data Base is based on the linear loss based split utility of CGEBox (Britz 2021).

Automated summary

The construction of the GTAP-AGROFOOD database for CGE modeling, which is consistent with the standard GTAP Data Base Version 10a, is discussed. The database includes 51 additional agro-food products and sectors, replacing 11 original GTAP agrofood products, resulting in a database with 105 products. The additional detail provided by this database can improve and enrich analyses of trade, bio-economy, as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation.