The GTAP model in R: The benefits of involving the community in the development of general equilibrium tools for the future

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, we introduce a translator for the TABLO language into R and we demonstrate it by bringing the standard GTAP model into the R platform. Second, we compare the performance of GTAP in R to the performance using the standard GEMPACK implementation for a sample of common general-equilibrium questions, involving changes in output taxes, productivity and trade policy, and for different sizes of aggregation. Finally, we describe the additional benefits for GTAP modeling stemming from the tools that are available in the R framework for general use. We conclude that while the speed of solving GTAP models using the existing solvers available in R is lagging, especially for larger models, the improvements that are needed to bring it to the level of GEMPACK are well-defined, and could be addressed by the community by building on the existing volume of work in sparse matrix algebra. The benefits to performing GTAP analysis in R are also found to be immense—first of all, the R framework would expand the availability of GTAP by allowing it to run on nearly any operating system without having to pay for any commercial solver; second, by existing in the R framework, the GTAP model could integrate effortlessly with the existing tools, enabling a wide range of data connections for processing inputs and outputs, including advanced technologies for reporting the model results.