The Modelling and Policy Impact Analysis (MPIA) program assists developing country researchers in constructing models of their national economy to simulate the impact of macroeconomic shocks/policies on various dimensions of poverty and welfare. To do so, it applies a combination of macro-micro modelling and simulation techniques including, for the macroeconomic level approach, a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) framework. CGE models account for the structural aspects of a country’s economy, i.e. the interactions among sectors and institutions, and their links with the global economy.
In recent years, however, MPIA leaders came to find that there was a need for reference models that were more elaborate and closer to real-life conditions than the ones that had been used so far. Moreover, policymakers face new challenges that call for impact assessments that look both forward in time and beyond national boundaries, to the global economy. And so lead researchers of the MPIA program (Bernard Decaluwe, Andre Lemelin, Helene Maisonnave, Veronique Robichaud) have devoted time and energy to creating a series of new standard CGE models that can respond to these needs.