A 2011 Social Accounting Matrix for the West Bank with detailed representation of households and labour accounts

A detailed Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for the West Bank is developed for the year 2011. The data used to build the SAM are obtained from various official sources in Palestine, mainly the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Major data sets include the Palestinian national accounts, the supply and use table, the balance of payments, the labour force survey data, the expenditure and consumption survey data, the economic survey report, the living standards report and the demographics report. The SAM provides data on 49 activities, 83 commodities, 110 households, 59 production factors and 58 tax accounts. Driven by the specificity of the West Bank economy, this SAM has several features including the classification of the households and labour accounts according to the workplace (West Bank, Israel and rest of the world), which in turn considers associating each household and each labour category with their eligibility to work in Israel. In addition to dividing the labour force into eligible and not eligible to work in Israel, the SAM also considers various eligibility levels. Other features of the SAM include the separation of transactions with Israel from those with the rest of the world as well as the separation of taxes collected domestically from those collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian National Authority. Furthermore, this SAM takes proper account of the compensation of labour for the self-employed and of household income from unincorporated capital. It also includes an account for non-profit organisations serving households and a Zakat account, which is introduced for the first time in SAM literature.