Overview

• Agricultural Sector Model
• Covered supply and demand of agricultural products.
• Covered the 15 EU Member States and the EU as a whole.
• Activity-based accounting approach, partly based on econometric and (non-)linear programming methods.
• Implemented by the European Commission, Eurostat.
• Developed in co-operation by EuroCARE, Eurostat and ILR.
• Application, maintenance and further developments by EuroCARE and ILR, funded by Eurostat.

Objectives

• Ex-post analyses of sectoral developments.
• Monitoring and diagnosis of the situation in the agricultural sectors of EU Member States.
• Short and medium-term forecasts and policy simulations of the effects of agricultural policy decisions.
• Consistency check of Eurostat's agricultural statistics.

Details

The structure and development of SPEL had largely benefited from the long-standing experience acquired by the ILR in agricultural sector analysis and policy advice since the 1970s (agricultural sector models like DIES, DAPS, QUISS)
Another basic condition for the development of SPEL was the long-standing and fruitful co-operation of the ILR, EuroCARE and Eurostat. The combination of such different types of institutions had led to an efficient application and maintenance of this complex and data-intensive computer-based policy information system.

• Regionalisation at Member State level, 15 regional units and the EU as a whole.
• Production activities: 35 crop activities and 13 animal activities.
• Product groups: 51 crop products, 27 animal products.
• Intermediate input groups: 9 specific for crop production, 19 specific for animal production, 8 for crop and animal production.
• Ex-post representation from 1973.
• The basic data source was Eurostat's data bank "NewCRONOS", the partitions ZPA1, COSA, PRAG, FEED, and SEC1.
• Additional data used from FADN and some national statistical sources.
• Farm managment data used to complete statistical gaps.

Each regional unit was represented by its own "Activity Based Table of Accounts" (ABTA) and "Matrix of Activity Coefficients" (MAC), covering important production interactions and product flows.

From a technical point of view, the whole system was computer-based. The technical development was based on transparency and flexible user-friendly interfaces. The algorithms, the data flow and data storage were carried out by programmes mainly written in FORTRAN77. Some results of the system were based on (non) linear distribution or optimisation algorithms with linear constraints (MINOS 5.3).

• The Base System (BS) was regularly applied at Eurostat and EuroCARE (twice a year) in order to update the reference period.
• The Short-term Forecast and Simulation System (SFSS) was regularly applied in combination with the up-dating of the reference period at Eurostat (twice a year), and further on the request of the European Commission for specific simulations.
• The SPEL/EU-Data (results of the BS and the SFSS) were published by Eurostat and publicly available on the technical media.
• The Medium-term Forecast and Simulation System (MFSS) was applied on the request of the European Commission at Eurostat in co-operation with EuroCARE. The reference data set for these simulations was published by Eurostat (up to 7 projection years).
• The SPEL/EU-Data and the SFSS were implemented and applied in the policy decision-making process of 8 EU Member States.

Publication

List of SPEL Literature