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openENTRANCE / openentrance

Definitions of common terms (variables, regions, etc.) for the openENTRANCE project
http://openentrance.eu
Apache License 2.0
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consumption and prices in economy.yaml #22

Open paopis opened 4 years ago

paopis commented 4 years ago

Hi, I have some comments on the data format of the economic models featured in the economy.yaml 1) consumption is considered in billion USD. Is this format appropriate as an input to other models? My assumption is that the other models would need a change in demanded quantity wrt a base year more than total expenditure. Would it not make sense to change the unit measure as the percentage change in quantity from a base year? (such as 2010) 2) A similar observation can be made for prices. In the yaml file we have that price for final energy is expressed in USD/GJ, but normally, macroeconomic models use percentage quantities for their calculations both for prices and quantities. These percentage variations can be converted into whatever unit is used in the receiving models. So also for prices, I would suggest using percentage changes wrt a base year.

sandrinecharousset commented 4 years ago

Hi @paopis We have been discussing the topic of units in different places of that repository since already a few weeks, and I am not sure wether we found a compromise or not.

Last input I was aware of, by @danielhuppmann was that there are several options: 1/allow for each variable a list of (recommended) units , leave modelling teams upload data with their favourite unit 2/ only allow a specific unit for each variable, make it mandatory by each team to convert their data before uploading And this interesting to know info :IIASA plans to have a feature for unit-conversion in the Scenario Explorer display, but this will probably not be ready before autumn 2020.

paopis commented 4 years ago

Thank you @sandrinecharousset, The first option seems the most reasonable.

danielhuppmann commented 4 years ago

Thanks @paopis for this remark! Good to have this discussion early!

One alternative solution in this particular case would be to leave e.g. Consumption in terms of absolute monetary value and add new variables like Consumption|Change relative to 2020 to describe the relative change. This would also solve the ambiguity when reading Consumption in 2050 as 73% - 73% of what...? The notes of the new variable should also make clear whether 73% is an increase of 73% or a reduction by 27%...

paopis commented 4 years ago

That would be ok. Also, I noticed that consumption is only defined as total (monetary) consumption of all the goods in the economy of each country in a given period. I think it is necessary to be able to define the consumption for each commodity on its own. Even if, it is probably too cumbersome to define a separate consumption for all the commodities, because each model could have a different aggregation of commodities, it is very important to have the consumption of electricity as a separate value.

danielhuppmann commented 4 years ago

Also, I noticed that consumption is only defined as total (monetary) consumption of all the goods in the economy of each country in a given period. I think it is necessary to be able to define the consumption for each commodity on its own.

Agree, please start a pull request adding the required subcategories.