Rural-urban social accounting matrixes for modelling the impact of rural development policies in the EU

This report complements previous work and builds NUTS3 SAMs for twelve regions, following a careful approach, that we call the expert approach. This report investigates the results of this approach by running some simple policy simulations and providing the structural descriptions of these regions. Further, this report aims at producing testing a more automatic approach to the construction of NUTS3 SAMs, to a view of reducing the necessary time and data requirements. Using several examples, this report examines whether such automatic approach can provide reliable SAMs at NUTS3 level. It finally draws conclusions as to the usefulness of both approaches in providing tools for further policy analysis in the field of rural development policy analysis