Alan A. Powell – In Memoriam

Earlier this month, on November 3, 2025, Alan Powell died in Melbourne, Australia. Most members of the GTAP community will know of Alan through the Alan A. Powell Award, which is given each year at the annual conference to the individual, or the team, affiliated with the GTAP Advisory Board that best exemplifies the spirit of Alan’s service to the Board. As the first ‘member at large’, Alan’s responsibility on the Board was to ensure that the network continued to serve the broader public interest and not just the interests of the individual member agencies. (The first meeting of the Advisory Board, in 1992, comprised representatives from four member agencies, along with Alan Powell as the member at large.)

Alan’s involvement with GTAP pre-dates the establishment of this project! It began with his invitation for me to spend my sabbatical with the IMPACT Project at Melbourne University, which he directed. At the time, I was disillusioned with CGE modeling – particularly the lack of replicability of results, and the unwillingness of research teams to share their data. (The economywide data bases were – and still are – the most challenging part of building a CGE model.) At IMPACT, I experienced a different approach. The ORANI model, developed by Peter Dixon and his team as part of the IMPACT Project, was widely used in government as well as academia. I was particularly impressed by the fact that the same model was often used by both sides in policy debate – each side making assumptions and parameter choices which favored their own position. In one notable case, the public debate actually honed in on the value of the Armington parameters in the model! Given his background in econometrics, Alan was a strong proponent of parameter estimation and model validation – topics which remain at the forefront of CGE modeling today.

In the early days of GTAP, Alan traveled multiple times to the US to prod stakeholders and share his IMPACT experiences and advice. At the tenth anniversary conference, he presented a paper assessing the origins of GTAP and its future potential. His legacy lives on today. However, rather than just one member at large, we now have three such members. In summary, Alan Powell’s legacy of economic modeling for the public good lives on in the GTAP community.

You can read here about Alan’s distinguished career in Australia, as viewed through the eyes of his long-time collaborator, Peter Dixon. You can also read about his contributions to the GTAP community on the website.