Critical reflections on Water-Energy-Food Nexus in Computable General Equilibrium models: A systematic literature review

The paper analyses how the Water-Energy-Food Nexus is treated in Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models, discussing their design, importance and possible ways of improvement. The analysis of their structure is critical for evaluating their potential efficiency in understanding the Nexus, which will be particularly effective for gauging the importance of the topic, the reciprocal dependency of its elements and the expected macroeconomic, demographic and climatic pressures that will act on its components. General equilibrium models can be useful devices to this end, as they are specifically built to track interdependencies and transmission effects across sectors and countries. Nevertheless, the review showed that most CGEs in the literature struggle to represent the competing water uses across sectors and, in particular, those concerning the energy sector. Therefore, it highlights the need to resolve this issue as a necessary step toward improving future research.