A Financial Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Luxembourg

A Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is a comprehensive, economy-wide data framework of real accounts, typically representing the economy of a nation but also providing the link between the economy and the rest of the world in terms of trade flows. However, in order to have a complete picture of the transactions taking place in an economy, real accounts are not sufficient and need to be complemented with financial accounts. This paper describes the construction of the first financial SAM for Luxembourg for the year 2007 by integrating both financial institutions and financial instruments into the real SAM. This powerful tool has two principal objectives: first, to organize the information that would allow an analysis of the structure of the economy of Luxembourg and second, to provide the benchmark data set for the creation of a financial computable general equilibrium (CGE) model.