Nathan was selected to perform a cost benefit analysis of the Panama Canal and its inter-related activities on the Panamanian Economy. The canal zone had expanded to include a set of inter-related activities increasingly linked to international trade and less dependent on canal traffic, and the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) developed a method for measuring these canal related activities and incorporating them into the national accounts system. The ACP sought to measure the economic impact of these activities on the Panamanian economy and desired to use software to simulate different scenarios of impacts on the economy due to exogenous changes.

Specifically during the course of the project, Nathan’s experts developed a complete Input-Output model to characterize the economy, which included maritime logistics regarding the canal. Then a social accounting matrix was developed for Panama, which was used in conjunction with a computational general equilibrium model (CGE) to estimate the impacts of these canal activities on the rest of the economy.

Part of this work included collaboration with the National Statistics Institute to develop a method to collect and measure the activities related to the logistics maritime cluster in Panama. In the final stage, our experts developed a user-friendly software-based interface to simulate different scenarios (high, low, medium growth) and estimate impacts in each case. The technical team was responsible for designing methods, processes and methodologies for the Institutional Measurement and Estimation Module (IMEM). This information system and economic modeling was created based on an inter-institutional agreement between the ACP, the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), the Comptroller General of the Republic and the Panama Maritime Authority (AMP).