The Vivid Economy-Wide (ViEW) model is a recursive dynamic model of economic activity, energy production, CO2 emissions and trade flows that can represent different countries.
As a general equilibrium model, ViEW models interactions between economics agents (firms, households and government) and across sectors within an economy and can account for feedback loops between these. It presents energy and non-energy sectors in detail. The energy sectors include three resource-extraction industries (coal, crude oil and natural gas) and multiple electricity generation technologies (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind and solar). Non-energy sectors include up to 12 agricultural sectors and 25 manufacturing sectors.
ViEW is able to evaluate how climate policies – such as a cap-and-trade programme, a carbon tax, or border carbon adjustment – impact individual sectors and overall economic activity.
The model was successfully used for the Partnership for Market Readiness (PMR) projects in Turkey, Ukraine and Sri Lanka, where it provided a complete picture of potential costs and benefits of different carbon policy options, and enabled policies to be designed to allow countries to reach their emissions reduction targets at least cost and with the greatest efficiency. ViEW can also be integrated with bottom-up models to provide a detailed analysis of individual sectors. It has been complemented with a bottom-up model of the energy sector for PMR Turkey and with a transport sector model for PMR Sri Lanka.