Social Accounting Matrices

The theory of international trade is a general equilibrium affair: offer curves, Edgeworth–Bowley box diagrams, and Travis boxes are frequently used tools. For a long time, however, applied trade policy analysis was restricted to partial equilibrium techniques. This was primarily due to constraints on data and computation for general equilibrium calibration and simulation. Nonlinear simulation software is now readily available, and general equilibrium techniques are often applied to trade policy problems. Surveys of these applications can be found in Shoven and Whalley (1984) and de Melo (1988).