The use of Applied General Equilibrium (AGE) models to contribute
to discussions on economic growth and poverty alleviation in less developed
countries has become widespread, particularly as data collection
capabilities have improved over the past several years. Nevertheless the
existence of a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), the central source of data
for any AGE model, remains lacking for many developing countries, often
rendering the AGE exercise impractical in such cases.
This paper details the construction of a SAM for a particularly datachallenged
context, that of Chad. The SAM was built for use in an AGE
model that looks at the interactions between Chad’s oil revenue spending
decisions and subsequent impacts on economic growth and household welfare.
The resulting SAM is the only publically available example for Chad
to account for economic flows at the dawn of the country’s oil economy.
The paper offers the AGE researcher interested in data-poor countries an
example of a strategy to weave together sparsely available information
into a SAM of sufficient credibility as input to a model.