Incorporating Nutritional Accounts in the GTAP Data Base

In this paper, we develop an approach towards incorporation of nutritional accounts for the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) Data Base. We rely on the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) food balance sheets data and nutritive indicators to estimate nutritional content of primary commodities and derived commodities represented in primary equivalent within the food balance sheets. Calories, fats, proteins and carbohydrates are estimated and reported. We further identify use categories that account for food, feed, seed, losses and other uses. In terms of food supply, we identify GTAP Data Base primary commodity sectors, food processing sectors and service sectors that supply food. To redistribute nutritional data according to GTAP Data Base sectors, we calculate Leontief inverses, operating only over those sectors (and uses) that supply food. Trade in both primary and processed commodities is taken into account. The approach is applied to all four GTAP 10 Data Base reference years and can be replicated in a dynamic modelling framework for each simulated year (time step).