Professor Peter McGregor (Fraser of Allander Institute), together with Mark Partridge (Ohio State) and Dan Rickman (Oklahoma State) are guest editors of the December issue of Regional Studies on Computable General Equilibrium Modelling. The special issue is focussed on innovations in regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling.
Regional CGEs are numerical simulation models of regional economies that have found increasing application in recent years to a wide range of policy issues, across a large number of countries. However, CGEs have not entirely displaced the use of alternative approaches (as evidenced by the continued wide use of regional input-output models in impact analyses, for example) as might have been expected, given that CGEs accommodate such models as special cases. The editors suggest this may not simply be due to Prof. McGregorthe inherent complexity of CGEs, but also to the limitations of earlier regional CGE models, for example the lack of dynamics that characterised many applications.
The issue includes a number of papers that seek to overcome some of the limitations of regional CGEs, although the editors acknowledge that no single issue of a journal could hope to give anything other than a brief taster for such a rapidly growing research area.
A Strathclyde contribution to the special issue, on Scotland's population ageing and decline, is co-authored by Katerina Lisenkova, Peter McGregor, Nikos Pappas, Kim Swales, Karen Turner and Robert Wright.