Social Accounting Matrix - Benchmarking

Benchmarking

Using a SAM includes the institutional structure assumed in the national accounts into any model. This means that variables and agents are not treated with monetary source-recipient flows in mind, but are rather grouped together in different categories according to the United Nations Standardised National Accounting (SNA) Guidelines. For example, the national accounts usually imputes the value of household investment or home-owner ‘rental’ income and treats some public sector institutional investment as direct income flows - whereas the SAM is trying to show just the explicit flows of money. Thus the data has to be untangled from its inherent SNA definitions to become money flow variables, and they then have to equal across each row and column, which is a process referred to as 'Benchmarking'.

A theoretical SAM always balances, but empirically estimated SAM’s never do in the first collation. This is due to the problem of converting national accounting data into money flows and the introduction of non-SNA data, compounded by issues of inconsistent national accounting data (which is prevalent for many developing nations, while developed nations tend to include a SAM version of the national account, generally precise to within 1% of GDP). This was noted as early as 1984 by Mansur and Whalley, and numerous techniques have been devised to ‘adjust’ SAMs, as “inconsistent data estimated with error, a common experience in many countries”.

The traditional method of benchmarking a SAM was simply known as the "Row-and-Columns" (RoW) method where one finds an arithmetic average of the total differences between the row and column in question, and adjust each individual cell until the row and column equal.

Robinson et al. (2001) suggests an improved method for ‘adjusting’ an unbalanced SAM in order to get all the rows and columns to equal, and gives the example of a SAM created for Mozambique’s economy in 1995, where the process of gathering the data, creating the SAM and ‘adjusting’ it, is thoroughly covered by Arndt et al. (1997). On inspecting the changes made to the Mozambique’s 1995 SAM to achieve balance is an adjustment of US$295 million which meant that $227 m US was added to the SAM net, just to balance the rows and columns. For 1995 this adjustment is equivalent to 11.65% of GDP. More disconcerting is perhaps the fact that agricultural producers (which according to FAO (1995) employed 85% of the labor force in 1994) were given a US$58 million pay raise in the SAM, meaning that 10% of agricultural income (equivalent to 5% of GDP) in the SAM was created, out of thin air. In other words, for a country where 38% of the population lived for less than $1 in the period 1994–2004 (UNICEF 2008), this SAM ‘adjustment’ added $4.40 to each person's income in the agricultural sector – more than any of the later trade and tax models using this SAM could arguably hope to achieve.