The strengths and limitations of long-term structural models: DSGE, CGE, Energy-Economic (SATIM-GE) and hybrid models

Date: Monday, 28 November 2022

Time: 09:00 - 16:00 GMT+2 (South Africa time)

Location: The Development Bank of South Africa Head Office

On 28 November, SA-TIED will host Officials from the National Treasury, the South African Reserve Bank, and academics from universities for a workshop on the strengths and limitations of long-term structural models: DSGE, CGE, Energy-Economic (SATIM-GE) and hybrid models.

This workshop will focus on the strengths and limitations of long-term structural models: DSGE, CGE, Energy-Economic (SATIM-GE) and hybrid models.

Presenters will be requested to present an example of their work with the primary intention to highlight the strengths as well as the limitations of the various modelling techniques. Specific emphasis can then be placed on the types of questions each type of modelling technique can answer or cannot answer.  The workshop will include open discussions on the strengths and limitations of these model.

A specific, but not exclusive, request to presenters will be to discuss how these models can be used to answer questions on the environment and energy supply (specifically given South Africa’s electricity supply crisis in an energy sector heavily dominated by coal-based generation capacity and a fiscally constrained public sector).

PROGRAMME

CHAIRS

Mark Swilling is Distinguished Professor of Sustainable Development in the Centre for Sustainability Transitions (CST) in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, University of Stellenbosch and Co-Director of the CST, and as from September 2021 Visiting Research Professor at the Environmental Justice Programme, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

Professor Philippe Burger is the Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences since March 2022 and Professor of Economics since 2007. As Professor of Economics, Professor Burger has held several leadership positions, including Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Pro-VC): Poverty, Inequality and Economic Development of the university and Vice-Dean (Strategic Projects) of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences from 2019 to early 2022, Head of the Department of Economics at the UFS from 2002 to 2019, and acted as Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences from February 2018 to January 2019.

SPEAKERS

Prof. Heinrich Bohlmann is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pretoria where he specialises in the development and application of dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) models for practical policy research. Prof. Bohlmann is also Research Director of the Modelling and Policy Impact Analysis group at the Partnership for Economic Policy, and serves on the Executive Council of the Economic Society of South Africa. He holds a PhD in Economics from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. 

Geraldine Dany-Knedlik heads the team of forecasting and economic policy at the DIW Berlin together with Timm Bönke. The DIW is a leading institute in economic research based in Berlin. Geraldine Dany-Knedlik's expertise lies in the areas of international macroeconomics and monetary policy. Special thematic focuses are inflation and monetary policy, spillovers of monetary policy, and the interactions between the business cycles and cycles of income and wealth inequality. Until 2021, she was head of global economic forecasting at DIW. Her career has included positions at the University of Nottingham, the Halle Institute for Economic Research, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank.

Gaël Giraud serves as Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy (Georgetown university) and is the founding-director of the Georgetown Environmental Justice Program. A former chief economist of the French Development Bank and senior researcher at the (French) National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), he specialized in ecological economics, macro-dynamics and mathematical economics. He is the author of six books and  many research papers. An alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), he has a PhD in mathematics and a PhD in theology. 

Hylton Hollander is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University. He received his PhD in Dynamic Macroeconomics (2014) from Stellenbosch University. His thesis, entitled “Financial frictions and the business cycle,” led to international publications in the Journal of Banking & Finance, the Journal of Macroeconomics, and Economic Modelling. Dr Hollander’s research broadly focuses on the interaction between financial markets and the real economy, and their related monetary, fiscal, and macroprudential policy prescriptions. His current research focuses on sovereign debt risk and fiscal sustainability, the sources and mitigation of financial instability, and international financial spillovers to emerging market economies. 

Charl Jooste is a Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Macro Modeling, Productivity and Debt Global Practice. He is responsible for building macroeconomic models for the World Bank and member countries. He has travelled to many countries to provide technical assistance in building modeling capacity at central banks and ministries of finance. His research focuses on modeling and econometric design issues, the macro-criticality of climate change, fiscal and monetary policy and competition policy effects on productivity, all of which are published in peer reviewed journals. Charl obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Pretoria. 

Bruno Merven is a senior researcher at the ESRG, UCT. He has worked on and has been involved in the development of several techno-economic energy systems models of South Africa, and many other countries in Africa. In recent years, he’s been centrally involved in the linking of the South African TIMES model (SATIM), developed at UCT and eSAGE, a CGE model based on the standard IFPRI CGE model. The linked modelling framework, SATIMGE, has been used for several ESRG projects, including the update South Africa’s NDC and the World Bank CCDR study and is the subject of his ongoing PhD research.

Steve Nicholls is the Head of Mitigation at South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission (PCC). In this role, Steve works with a range of stakeholders to reach a consensus on net-zero pathways for each sector of the economy built on a strong fact base and supporting capacity building and cooperation within the modelling community in South Africa. Understanding future competitive economies and what kind of investments are required to enhance South Africa’s economic competitiveness while creating employment and reducing inequality and poverty will be his key focus.