The GVAR Toolbox
The GVAR Toolbox was originally launched in December 2010 with the release of version 1.0, sponsored by the European Central Bank. Version 1.1 was released in July 2011 and is available to download, free of charge, from this website.
Derived from Dr. L.Vanessa Smith's project Exploring International Economic Linkages Using a Global Model, the GVAR Toolbox 1.1 is the second release of a collection of MatLab procedures with an Excel-based interface, designed for the purpose of GVAR modelling. The GVAR modelling approach provides a general yet practical global modelling framework for the quantitative analysis of the relative importance of different shocks and channels of transmission mechanisms. This makes it a suitable tool for policy analysis, although it has been used in a number of other contexts, including analysing credit risk and evaluating the UK entry into the Euro. The GVAR Toolbox 1.1 is primarily tailored to policy analysis and forecasting.
The Toolbox is an accessible and easy to use package, with no background knowledge of MatLab or Excel required. In order to use it, both Microsoft Excel and MatLab have to be installed on the user's computer. No specific MatLab toolboxes are required for running the program.
The program itself can be used either with the existing GVAR structure based on Dees, di Mauro, Pesaran and Smith (2007) or variants of it, or as a very general modelling framework for any large system where components are driven by weighted averages of other components. It can be applied to countries, regions, states, firms, regional housing markets to name a few possibilities. Many or few countries (for example) can be used, so long as the required weak exogeneity assumptions are satisfied. Read more