Version 7.85 (June 7th, 2022)

Model Updates

• Agricultural Labor only updated if we have enough Rural population:

The general purpose of GTAPDuplicate is to normalize the labor properly for grouped GTAP countries. These countries as you know starts with an “X” as the first letter of the GTAP code. This normalization was not initializing agricultural employment very well, especially for some African countries. So, for countries which are grouped in GTAP, we decided to read agricultural labor directly from the WDI data table – SeriesLaborAgriSector. The line that you mentioned, makes sure agricultural employment obtained from WDI is not way over the rural population.

• Fix limit on Agricultural Labor:

Some low income countries, have a lower GDP, close to 40% lower for Niger. These countries are now initialized with smaller share of labor force in ag, for example, 75% in Niger as opposed to 87% before code change. These previously-initialized as ag labors are now in service and manufacture. This reduces the initial labor productivity (VADD per labor) in these sectors, which seems to  exacerbate over time, for reasons I don’t understand yet.

In the plots below, green in the base run with the changed code.