Award Contract for The Provision of Economic Modelling Licences

The development of a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to model the wider economic impacts of a major rail scheme such as HS2 started last year, it was a collaboration between the Department for Transport and Department for Business and Trade (DBT). One of the Major Rail Projects Group analysts was seconded to DBT for one year and worked closely with the Macro Analysis and Modelling (MAM) team to build the CGE model for transport. MAM use GAMS software for modelling the economic impact of free trade agreements on UK trade and growth. Therefore, the software used by DfT and DBT to build the CGE model was GAMS. The first stage of model building has concluded but in order to continue the work to develop the model further we need to procure 5 licenses, which comprise 3 packages, which in turn will help to build DfT's modelling capacity. The model is now in the ownership of DfT but without GAMS licenses we cannot progress further with the modelling work. Hence, procuring licenses from GAMS is the only way forward to continue. Additionally, this is intended to be a long term project, as the CGE model is currently in the process of being peer reviewed. Once the review has concluded, we aim to refine and develop the model based on the reviewer's comments. We will be working closely with HS2 Ltd for this stage of the project, who are also currently in the process of procuring their own GAMS licenses in order to collaborate with us.