The Common Agricultural Policy SIMulation (CAPSIM) model : structure and applications

The Common Agricultural Policy SIMulation (CAPSIM) model is one of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC-IPTS) in-house models used for impact analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It is a calibrated, comparative static, partial equilibrium model which was developed in the early 1980s by the European Centre for Agricultural, Regional and Environmental Policy Research and the University of Bonn on behalf of the Directorate General Eurostat (DG ESTAT) for agricultural policy analysis. In 2006, CAPSIM was transferred from DG ESTAT to JRC-IPTS. The CAPSIM model has a disaggregated coverage of items and individual European Union Member States and Candidate Countries. The present JRC-IPTS Technical Report describes the model structure of CAPSIM in its version from 2005 with several applications. The first part of the report focuses on explaining the model specification, particularly: supply and demand side, processing, labour, different policy regimes as applied in the CAP, trade regimes and welfare calculations. The second part describes the CAPSIM programme code in order to provide a guided tour through the technical aspects of the model for potential users.