This Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) was built for the year 2008 for Mexico. It explicitly accounts for Oportunidades cash transfers. In this SAM, the government has a separate account for providing Oportunidades cash transfers to recipient households. The SAM has 14 different activities of production, 15 production factors, and 16 household groups. Using a cross-entropy technique,the SAM was balanced and made perfectly consistent with macro accounts of Mexico. This SAM was used to analyze the distributional effects of the Oportunidades conditional cash transfers in a top-down b ottom-up macro-micro simulation model that links in bi-directional and iterative way a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and an econometrically informed micro simulation model.
