National Council of Applied Economic Research
NCAER is hosting a seminar on “Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Modelling, a Tool for Economic Policy: Achievements and New Challenges” with Professor Peter B. Dixon at the Centre for Policy Studies at Victoria University in Melbourne.
Since its inception in 1960 with the work of Leif Johansen, CGE modelling has proved popular and versatile. The Global Trade Analysis Project, the peak CGE network, has 15,000 members from 150 countries. CGE modelling is used throughout the world to provide historical analyses and forecasts and to elucidate policy issues in trade, microeconomic reform, labour markets, energy, environment, public finance, immigration, infrastructure, tourism, technology, natural resources and commodity prices.
This presentation briefly traces the evolution of CGE modelling and explains some of the things that CGE modelling has taught us. It then sets out five challenges for the field: absorption of technical/engineering information; inclusion of monetary phenomena; integration with modern macro; integration with modern trade theory; and inclusion of the essential features of global supply chains.
Peter B. Dixon is Professor, Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University in Melbourne. He joined the Australian government’s IMPACT Project in 1975 after working at the IMF and then the Reserve Bank of Australia. At IMPACT he led the team that created the ORANI model. This was the world’s first detailed (100 industries) computable general equilibrium model regularly used in policy analysis. In the 1990s with colleagues at Monash University he created the MONASH model, the dynamic successor to ORANI. These two models have been prominent in the Australian economic debate for 35 years and have been used as templates for other models throughout the world. In recent years Dixon developed the USAGE model of the U.S. which is used by the U.S. International Trade Commission and the US Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, Transportation and Homeland Security. Dixon was appointed to the Chair in Economic Theory at La Trobe University in 1978 and to a Visiting Professorship at Harvard in 1983. From 1984 to 1991 he was Director and Professor in the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne, and in 1991 he took up his position as Director and Professor in the Centre of Policy Studies at Monash University. He moved to Victoria University in 2014. Dixon was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 1982. In 2003, he was awarded the Distinguished Fellowship of the Economic Society of Australia and in 2006 he was appointed Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor at Monash. In 2013, Elsevier published its two-volume Handbook of Computable General Equilibrium Modeling edited by Dixon and Dale Jorgenson.
Dixon has a PhD and MA in economics from Harvard (where he was one of Wassily Leontief’s last students) and a BA in Economics from Monash.
For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or on 91-11-2345-2722.