Developing and Implementing Large Economic Models Using GEMPACK, A General Purpose Software Suite

This paper gives a brief overview of a new suite of software designed to make it relatively painless to implement large economic models, especially those in the computable general equilibrium (CGE) class. Whereas in the past a large element in the cost of building these models has been the writing of special-purpose code, the GEMPACK facility described here virtually eliminates the need for tailor-made programs. Moreover, because this facility is accessed via an essentially algebraic language, the GEMPACK computer text file used to implement an economic model provides an easily understood, but exhaustive and definitive, documentation of the model itself - something which only rarely has been available in the past