Social accounting matrix

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) represents flows of all economic transactions that take place within an economy (regional or national). It is at the core, a matrix representation of the National Accounts for a given country, but can be extended to include non-national accounting flows, and created for whole regions or area. SAMs refer to a single year providing a static picture of the economy.'By the early 1980s, CGE models were heavily ensconced as the approach of the World Bank for development analysis. Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) were similarly a mainstay of Bank analysis, which had been adopted as a presentational device by the CGE modelers' (Mitra-Kahn 2008: 23) A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) represents flows of all economic transactions that take place within an economy (regional or national). It is at the core, a matrix representation of the National Accounts for a given country, but can be extended to include non-national accounting flows, and created for whole regions or area. SAMs refer to a single year providing a static picture of the economy.