Essay GAMS for Environmental-Economic Modelling – Economics Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Introduction

GAMS is a software package used to solve systems of equations. GAMS stands for General Algebraic Modelling System and is constructed by the GAMS Development Corporation. GAMS contains different solvers for different purposes.

Various kinds of economic models can be written down as a system of equations, including systems analysis, non-linear optimisation and equilibrium modelling.

GAMS is widely used across the world among economists.

This reader is written for students of Environmental Economics at Wageningen University. The reader will be used in the course Theories and Models in Environmental Economics (ENR-30306) and for students who want to learn GAMS for their thesis. In principle, the reader is structured such that anyone with access to GAMS can learn how to build models in GAMS, but all examples are chosen within the field of environmental economics. The reader is structured as follows. Section 2. gives an introduction in the GAMS language and the interface GAMS-IDE that accompanies GAMS. Section 3. presents exercises to learn GAMS. Step by step, the user will learn all major features of GAMS, starting with very simple exercises that experienced Windows-users can quickly go through, via intermediate level exercises that present the building blocks for more advanced models, to the advanced level, where whole GAMS models are constructed using a general economic description. Section 4. presents some exercises that deal with certain model types, like systems modelling. These exercises are specific for the course Theories and Models in Environmental Economics, but other readers may find these exercises a good way to test their understanding of GAMS.

The reader does not provide the answers (model codes) to the exercises. Rather, the main outcomes of the models are represented in Appendix II. You can find some remarks on common error messages in Appendix 1.

GAMS on the Internet The homepage of the GAMS corporation (www.gams.com) contains a lot of useful information. From the homepage, a full user guide can be downloaded at www.gams.com/docs/document.htm; the user guide contains the syntax for all GAMS commands and very helpful as a reference when writing GAMS models. Note that the user guide is also available via the Help function in GAMS-IDE.

The introductory chapter to the GAMS User Guide, written by Rick Rosenthal, gives a good overview of how GAMS works. All readers are advised to study this tutorial when starting to learn the GAMS software.

On the homepage of the Environmental Economics Group of Wageningen University, there is a special page with GAMS Tips and Tricks. You can browse through this list of useful hints to increase your programming skills and improve your own models. Don’t worry if you cannot fully understand all hints; some are at a more advanced level or are highly specific.