Getting the best of both worlds? Linking CAPRI and GTAP for an economywide assessment of agriculture

Many current research questions in economics span issues from the very small and detailed to the very large and abstract, or require the interdisciplinary study of relations between fields that are causally widely separated and generally not studied together: Such questions stress, in the absence of “The Great Model For Everything”, the trade-off between generality and depth, i.e. between covering many aspects of the system studied and details of certain interesting components. This dilemma may be resolved by linking specialized models to exploit their different strengths. This paper develops a link between the general equilibrium model GTAP (offering an economywide perspective) and the partial agricultural model CAPRI (offering a detailed model of the agricultural production and policies).