The import content of expenditure components and the size of international spillovers

For a large number of countries, we augment the specification of import demand in NiGEM by accounting for different import contents of individual expenditure components. Three examples illustrate that these changes have important implications for model outcomes. In the case of the recently enacted US tax reform and in a ‘hard landing’ scenario for China, spillovers become more pronounced while the domestic effects turn out more muted than in the default specification. The reverse is true for the ramifications of a public investment push in Germany. Hence, we believe that our add-on to NiGEM can be a useful tool for robustness exercises, in particular for spillover studies.