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GTAP Resources: Resource Display

GTAP Resource #5534

"Estimating Elasticities for Crop Production in Niger using Maximum Entropy "
by Kabir, Kayenat and Thomas Hertel


Abstract
Niger faces the task of feeding and employing a very young and growing population in an increasingly harsh climate with limited natural resources and human capital. Understanding the sources of growth over a historical period will provide insights to look forward into the future of food security of Niger.We use a partial equilibrium model (SIMPLE:A Simplified International Model of crop Prices Land use and the Environment) to understand historical crop output growth and the drivers of the growth in Niger. Following the maximum entropy approach a set of estimated elasticity values of price, income, supply and substitution between factors of production are obtained by maximizing an approximate likelihood function in the context of a back casting exercise. This method takes advantage of the model constraints, the full time series of available historical data, and prior knowledge about distribution of parameters and unobserved endogenous variables of interest; and provides a statistical basis for judging the robustness of the estimated parameters. The historical validation of SIMPLE through this exercise makes it scientifically suitable to predict future food security scenarios in Niger under pertinent conditions such as climate change induced yield variation and population boom. SIMPLE has been historically (1961-2006) validated at global and broad regional scales, but not at the country level and certainly not for Niger. Moreover for the validation the technique used was quite simple, namely researchers ran the model over two points in time, compared results for target variables with the historical record. Despite its advantage of imposing the full set of model constraints, the major disadvantage is that it did not make use of the full historical time path and provided no formal basis for judging robustness of estimated parameters. The use of the maximum entropy method for estimating the model parameters makes it more robust.


Resource Details (Export Citation) GTAP Keywords
Category: 2018 Conference Paper
Status: Published
By/In: Presented at the 21st Annual Conference on Global Economic Analysis, Cartagena, Colombia
Date: 2018
Version:
Created: Kabir, K. (4/13/2018)
Updated: Kabir, K. (4/16/2018)
Visits: 1,525
- Calibration and parameter estimation
- Model validation and sensitivity analysis
- Land use
- Food prices and food security
- Africa (West)


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