Aggregated Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) will be built for the Portuguese economy in 1997, 1998 and 1999, based on the country's national accounts statistics. The SAMs will be shown as a working instrument for quantifying the flows in the economic circuit and for simulating the effects resulting from changes in such flows. The economic flows associated with the government subsectors will be emphasised, whilst accounting and fixed-price multipliers will be calculated to facilitate the study of the effects resulting from changes in the government's expenditure, which will also be subjected to a test on their veracity.

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Economics - Macro-economics, general, grade: 100, Tecnológico de Monterrey, language: English, abstract: In the light of recent economic crises the necessity of more detailed and especially financial investigations for economic policy makers and the majority of economic agents surged imperatively around the world. However, one quite popular analysis instrument used in many countries, unfortunately in Germany and some other members of the European Union seems to be lacking its deserved attention. Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) and their respective Computable Equilibrium Models (CGEs) represent a useful tool for profound and targeted economic analysis worldwide. Basically, observed and selected data of a base year is accommodated into a matrix presentation taking into account the double-entry accounting principle of revenues and expenditures revealing cross-institutional and cross-sectorial information or the mix of both. The underlying principle is to connect the producing part of an economy with the national institutions and the rest of the world in order to be able to conduct a significant analysis through a Computable Equilibrium Model. This model is calibrated and computed to generate the general equilibrium of an economy with the help of (mostly neo-classical) economic equations and assumptions reproducing the same values as observed in reality. In consequence, it is possible to perform an economic experiment predicting the reactions of the economy under consideration when facing those exogenous shocks. Until now, most SAMs and therefore CGEs have focused on a too limited presentation of the economies ignoring completely the financial part of it, even though this is an essential and in modern economies decisive part of economic life. This paper aims to transmit a step by step illustration of the elaboration of a Financial Social Accounting Matrix (FSAM) and the gradual development of an economic CGE model written in GAMS which makes use of the same data. In the end, an experiment is conducted taking into account the German Share Index DAX and a multitude of macroeconomic equilibrium equations.

The Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is presented as a tool for measuring and modelling the activity of countries and regions. An SAM-based approach to the study of such activity enables it to be described both empirically and theoretically through numerical and algebraic versions of that same matrix. This approach is presented using the words of those responsible for its foundation: Richard Stone and Graham Pyatt.Applications of the SAM to Portugal and the Azores serve to underline the importance of ensuring consistency with the national and regional accounts when measuring and modelling the activity of countries and regions with SAMs. These applications are based, on the one hand, on SAMs for the Azores and Portugal, which have the same structure and identical characteristics and were constructed to serve as a database for a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and, on the other hand, on a SAM for Portugal, the author's area of research, which was constructed using the above-mentioned SAM-based approach.It is also underlined that such a task can be performed better if all of the part that is measured by the national and regional accounts is included in the study. These same accounts should be considered as the basic sources of information. The comparison of such applications underlines the importance of working with the institutional sectors together with the sectors of activity, as well as with the part relating to the secondary distribution of income together with the primary distribution of income. Also identified within this context are the risks of failing to consider important interactions in the activity of countries and regions, as well as the biases to be found in the analysis of the results.

"To illustrate the use of social accounting matrices (SAMs) in applied general equilibrium (GE) modeling, we use an aggregated SAM for the Spanish economy to calibrate a simple applied GE model. The idea is to construct artificial people--households, government, and a foreign sector--who make the same transactions in the equilibrium of the model economy as do their counterparts in the data. This calibration procedure can be augmented, or partially substituted for, by statistical estimation of key parameters. We show the usefulness of such a model by presenting the results of a comparative exercise that mimics the policy changes that took place in Spain during its 1986 integration into the European Community. Sub-sequent data shows the model results to be remarkably accurate, especially if we account for other major shocks affected the Spanish economy in 1986"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

A social acccounting matrix (SAM) is a tool that has specific features for conducting studies in several different areas, as well as for supporting the policy decision process. Following an application for Portugal, a SAM-based approach is adopted for studying (measuring and modelling) the impact of the introduction of a social policy measure of the increase in households' income on the socio-economic activity of a country, and the associated institutions' income. Numerical and algebraic versions of a SAM enable the identification of the networks of the linkages of the monetary or nominal flows measured by the national accounts and the corresponding structural features, as well as the associated multiplier effects, which are used to measure the impact on the socio-economic activity. This measurement is at a macroeconomic level, using macroeconomic aggregates and balances.