DIGNAR-19 Toolkit

Source details

The IMF has created an extension of the Debt Investment Growth and Natural Resources (DIGNAR) model (Melina, Yang and Zanna, 2016) to facilitate quantitative macroeconomic assessments and policy scenario analysis during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The original DSGE model was developed for resource-rich developing economies to help assess the effects of public investment on growth and debt sustainability.
The IMF model extension is called DIGNAR-19 and is available online as a toolkit.

The toolkit is particularly useful for officials at ministries of finance, debt agencies, central banks, and other government agencies responsible for providing advice or implementing macroeconomic analysis of debt policies.
Use cases:
- Incorporate shocks associated with the pandemic.
- Produce macroeconomic scenarios with an emphasis on GDP growth and government debt.
- Analyze outcomes conditional on domestic and supranational policy responses.

The DIGNAR-19 toolkit is an application designed to facilitate the use of the DIGNAR-19 model by economists with little to no knowledge of Matlab and Dynare, via a user-friendly Excel-based interface.
The framework benefits from an internally consistent setup delivered by a general equilibrium approach.

The toolkit comprises three tools:
- the simulation tool,
- the graphing tool,
- the realism tool.
These tools translate the contents of an Excel input file into instructions for Matlab/Dynare programs, minimizing the user's interactions with those programs, which are largely executed behind the scenes.
Outputs are saved in a separate Excel file that users can visualize in customizable charts.

The toolkit requires that Excel, Matlab, and Dynare are installed on the user’s computer.