Trade Liberalisation and Spatial Inequality: Methodological Innovations in Vietnamese Perspective

This paper develops a SAM database encompassing 6,002 representative Vietnamese households, mapping one-to-one with 16 aggregate households. The database is used to calibrate two Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models with respectively 16 aggregate and 6,002 disaggregate households. Aggregate model results are compared to those of the disaggregated model to demonstrate the importance of endogenous modelling of micro households within a static CGE model framework. The methodology of relying on a consistent micro-household data-set achieves the twin objectives of allowing for changes in the distribution of household expenditures and the possibility of computing poverty measures at a very disaggregate level. As such, we aim at contributing with methodological advances in the assessment of the poverty impact of macro-policies.