APEC Conference "Building APEC Economies’ Capacities of Employing Input-Output Tables for Advanced Economic Modeling"

Grand Copthorne Waterfront Hotel

Singapore 24-25 November 2011

• Background
• Purpose
• Summary of the Conference and background materials
• Agenda and Presentations
• Additional materials
• Useful Links

APEC economies should seize the moment and absorb the policy advice arising from Input-Output modeling solutions, experts and participants agreed at a recently concluded conference in Singapore.

The Conference was held on November 24-25, 2011 as part of a self-funded project proposal developed by the Russian Federation and endorsed by the APEC Senior Officials’ Steering Committee on ECOTECH. The Conference was sponsored by the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation and organized by the Higher School of Economics, a Moscow-based National Research University.

Background

For more than two decades, APEC has been a vibrant forum for regional consultation and dialogue and has guided the increasingly interdependent Asia-Pacific economies towards a more effective and coherent cooperation. APEC pursues the overarching Bogor Goal of achieving free and open trade and investment in the Asia Pacific by 2020.

Setting out the vision of an economically integrated, robust and secure APEC community in Yokohama 2010 Declaration, APEC Leaders highlighted the need of concrete, practical, and measurable steps.

There has been renewed interest among APEC economies in activities that entail measurement of progress and analysis of impact of economic policies. Initiatives such as Supply Chain Connectivity Framework and APEC New Strategy for Structural Reform call for setting numerical targets which may be quantitatively assessed.

To attain the best design of domestic and external sector policies, policy makers may require qualitative and quantitative analytical tools. Examples include Regulatory Impact Assessment and Free Trade Impact Assessment studies which are effectively used by a growing number of APEC economies and worldwide.

Some of the most sophisticated modeling techniques utilise extensive flow of economic statistics in the form of Input-Output Tables (IOT). Input-Output Tables offer the most detailed portrait of an economy. They enable a detailed analysis of the process of production and the use of goods and services (products) and the income generated in that production. The tables are more complex than most other statistics and their compilation is challenging. But the benefits are large in many ways despite the required efforts.

With the globalisation and regionalisation of economic activities, many analysts have rediscovered the great utility of these specific statistics for several purposes of policy advice. In fact, inter-regional Input-Output techniques have recently produced exciting results in several areas of APEC interest. These include quantification of supply or value chains performance and environment policies impact assessments.

As an integral component of the System of National Accounts, IOT are frequently compiled and used by individual economies. Various collaborative projects also pursued compilation of international IOT databases, including the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) project, IDE-JETRO’s Asian Input-Output Tables and the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP).

An APEC-wide exchange of practices in the area of IOT may be beneficial to all member economies with a view to build capacity for application of advanced methodologies to quantify the effects of various regional processes and policies. The issue of availability and compatibility of IOT may also need to be addressed by exploring further statistical capacity building within APEC.

With consideration of the above, the Russian Federation developed an APEC self-funded project proposal "Building APEC Economies' Capacities of Employing Input-Output Tables for Advanced Economic Modeling". The project proposal (SCE 01/2011S) was endorsed by the APEC Senior Officials' Steering Committee on Economic and Technical Cooperation at the second 2011 meeting in Big Sky, Montana (USA). The Conference in Singapore was the project’s main activity.

Purpose

The self-funded project was designed to identify the need and interest among APEC economies in a closer collaboration on advanced economic policy modeling. The purpose of the conference was to explore whether international input-output tables and related models may be a practical tool for impact analysis of various APEC policy initiatives.

The first day of the conference included presentations and Q & A sessions to raise APEC members’ awareness about the academic achievements in the area of economic policy modeling and the applicability of results. The second day provided an avenue for discussion of what can be APEC’s role in building capacities in the area of producing and employing IOT in the foreseeable future.

Summary of the Conference and background materials

The Conference participants agreed to send a message to APEC Senior Officials in the form of a brief summary which, in particular, says that “If policy makers’ understanding of the economy and international economic linkages is refined, it may progressively change the way governments formulate and implement their policies”.

Summary of the Conference

Discussion Paper: APEC Agenda and Input-Output Modeling. Preliminary Ideas for Collaboration

Speaker and Moderator Biographies

Agenda and Presentations

Additional materials

APEC News Release

All Documents for Download as a Single Batch (RAR Archive)

Useful Links

• APEC Official Website 
• The WTO Made In the World Initiative (MIWI) website 
• International Input-Output Analysis Studies Group, IDE-JETRO, Japan 
• WTO/IDE-JETRO joint publication Trade patterns and global value chains in East Asia: From trade in goods to trade in tasks
• Koopman et al., 2010, “Give Credit Where Credit is Due,”
• USITC, 2011, “The Economic effects of significant U.S. import restraints” 
• Integrated Sustainability Analysis, The University of Sydney