SEAMCAP - the CAPRI version in SEAMLESS-IF

Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 12:49 Written by Marcel Adenauer Tuesday, 08 December 2009 14:28

CAPRI is a success story of an economic model developed by European Commission research funds. Operational since almost a decade, it supports decision making related to the Common Agricultural Policy based on sound scientific quantitative analysis. CAPRI is only viable due to its Pan-European network of researchers which based on an open source approach tender together for projects, develop and maintain the model, apply it for policy impact assessment, write scientific publications and consult clients based on its results.

The CAPRI modeling system itself consists of specific data bases, a methodology, its software implementation and the researchers involved in their development, maintenance and applications. The data bases exploit wherever possible well-documented, official and harmonised data sources, especially data from EUROSTAT, FAOSTAT, OECD and extractions from the Farm Accounting Data Network (FADN). Specific modules ensure that the data used in CAPRI are mutually compatible and complete in time and space. They cover about 50 agricultural primary and processed products for the EU, from farm type to global scale including input and output coefficients. The economic model builds on a philosophy of model templates which are structurally identical so that instances for products and regions are generated by populating the template with specific parameter sets. This approach ensures comparability of results across products, activities and regions, allows for low cost system maintenance and enables its integration within a large modelling network such as SEAMLESS. At the same time, the approach opens up the chance for complementary approaches at different levels, which may shed light on different aspects not covered by CAPRI or help to learn about possibility aggregation errors in CAPRI.

More details on CAPRI, including the model documentation, can be found on www.capri-model.org.

Within the SEAMLESS project an adjusted version of the simulation engine of CAPRI (capmod) has been developed (called SEAMCAP) in order to integrate it into the SEAMLESS framework that

- allows to use external elasticities provided by EXPAMOD to steer the supply response

- allows to transfer scenario parameters from a Guided User Interface (GUI) for scenario handling

- prepares a subset of model outputs to make them available to the user of SEAMLESS-IF