NEWS

icio 1.0.0

First release of icio, a rename and consolidation of the CRAN package decompr (Quast and Kummritz 2015), whose original maintainer is no longer active. The package is now maintained by Sebastian Krantz, a co-author of later decompr versions, at https://github.com/SebKrantz/icio, and starts fresh at 1.0.0 with no backwards compatibility with decompr.

The last CRAN release of decompr was 6.9.0, and everything below is relative to it. Two further decompr versions were developed but never published – 7.0.0 (completing the Borin-Mancini variant surface) and 8.0.0 (reducing the intermediate object) – so their changes are included here.

The Borin-Mancini decomposition

bm() now covers the full set of Stata icio perspectives and approaches. In 6.9.0 it offered the exporter/source and world/sink variants only; it now additionally supports

perspective = "exporter" with approach = "sink" (9 terms; the bilateral level adds VAXIM, the domestic VA absorbed by the direct importer),
perspective = "world" with approach = "source" (9 terms),
perspective = "self" (sector or bilateral level), the export flow’s own perimeter, giving the broader Johnson (2018) / Los et al. (2016) domestic value added (9 terms), and
flow = "imports", an importer-perspective decomposition of gross imports into value added and double counting (GIMP = VA + DC), at the country level or by value-added origin.

It remains the R counterpart of decompose() in the Julia package GlobalValueChains.jl (formerly ICIO.jl), reproduces the Stata icio command’s output, and agrees with the Julia implementation to machine precision on real ICIO tables.

Loading ICIO tables

load_tables_vectors() is replaced by load_icio(), which returns an object of class icio (previously decompr). Its arguments are named after the elements of an iot table – inter, final, countries, industries, output, va – rather than x, y, k, i, o, v. An iot-class list such as data(leather) is detected automatically when passed as the first argument, so there is no separate iot argument: load_icio(leather) and load_icio(inter, final, countries, industries) both work.

New load_icio_csv() reads the CSV format of the Stata icio command – a headerless GN x (GN + G) matrix [inter | final] plus a one-column country-list file – via data.table::fread(). Industry codes may be given as a vector, as a path to a one-column CSV, or omitted (defaulting to sector1 ... sectorN). This mirrors read_icio_csv() in GlobalValueChains.jl.

The intermediate object has been reduced. In 6.9.0 it carried five dense GN x GN matrices, but only two held independent information: Am, Bd, Bm and L were masked or block-diagonal copies of the input coefficients and of the Leontief inverse, and Bd and L were stored dense despite being block-diagonal, hence 1 - 1/G structural zeros (98% at G = 50). The object now holds the full input coefficient matrix A (previously only Am, with the domestic blocks zeroed, was kept) and the domestic Leontief inverse as the list Lb of the G local N x N blocks it consists of. The fields Am, Bd, Bm, L, Eint, Efd and rownam are gone; the object is A, B, Lb, E, ESR, Vc, G, N, GN, k, i, X, Y, Yd, Ym. Code that used the removed fields can rebuild them with

Am <- A; Bd <- matrix(0, GN, GN); Bm <- B; L <- matrix(0, GN, GN)
for (g in seq_len(G)) {
  bg <- (g - 1L) * N + seq_len(N)
  Am[bg, bg] <- 0; Bd[bg, bg] <- B[bg, bg]; Bm[bg, bg] <- 0; L[bg, bg] <- Lb[[g]]
}

and Efd equals Ym, Eint equals ESR - Ym, rownam equals names(Vc).

The decomposition functions derive whatever masked forms they need. leontief(), kww() and bm() work entirely off the diagonal blocks of B and off Lb, without ever materializing a dense Bd, Bm or L. wwz(), which uses the masked matrices in dense products throughout, rebuilds Am, Bd and Bm on entry.

The loader is faster and allocates far less: the block-diagonal L comes from G small solves instead of one dense solve(I - Ad) (two orders of magnitude cheaper for an identical result), exports by destination are assembled from inter and Y directly instead of from a masked cbind(inter, final) copy, and forming I - A in place avoids a GN x GN identity matrix. On a 50-country, 40-industry table the object went from 160 MB to 66 MB and construction from 5.2 to 4.1 seconds, with all decompositions reproducing their previous results to within 3e-12 relative.

Fixed: an output vector supplied through an iot object was silently ignored, because the loader looked for the element output while data(leather) and the iot documentation call it out (R’s partial matching does not bridge the two). Both names are now accepted, as is an optional va element.

Running decompositions

decomp() now takes an icio object (or a list of them) instead of raw tables, so the expensive construction step is always explicit and reusable. Its default method is "bm", the recommended decomposition.

Given a list of icio objects – typically one ICIO table per year – decomp() runs the decomposition on each and stacks the results with data.table::rbindlist(), prepending an identifier column named by idcol (default "Label", NULL to omit). This mirrors the Dict method of decompose() in GlobalValueChains.jl.

All decompositions now return a data.table rather than a data.frame. Note that d[, "GEXP"] returns a one-column table rather than a vector, and d[c("GEXP", "DVA")] is a join rather than a column subset – use d$GEXP, d[, .(GEXP, DVA)], or as.data.frame(d) for base-R semantics. data.table is a new dependency.

kww() is substantially faster: re-associating Bm %*% Am %*% L %*% Z as Bm %*% (Am %*% (L %*% Z)), with Z having only G columns, removes two GN x GN x GN matrix products. On a 2000 x 2000 table it went from 10.3 to 0.6 seconds. A dead Vc * B allocation was also removed.

bm(), leontief(), kww(), wwz() and wwz2kww() are otherwise unchanged, including their arguments and term names.

Fixed: 34 roxygen lines in wwz()’s documentation used a typographic apostrophe (#’) instead of #' and were therefore silently dropped, leaving the help page without its @return section describing the 16 terms.

Removed

The RStudio addin (decomp_gadget()) and its addins.dcf, the deprecated load_tables() interface, the unused tiva() stub, the kww_example / kww_experimental scratch files, and the package startup message.

The gvc package is no longer suggested; it was not used by any test, example or vignette. (It is in any case unaffected by the object reduction, using only G, N, GN, k, i and X.)

decompr 6.9.0

Added the Borin-Mancini (2019) decomposition via the new bm() function (also available through decomp(method = "bm")). It decomposes gross exports into up to 13 value-added and GVC terms at the country, sector, or bilateral-sector level, under the exporter/source or world/sink perspective. It is the R counterpart of decompose() in the Julia package ICIO.jl and reproduces the Stata icio command’s output.

The kww() documentation now notes that the KWW decomposition is biased (it systematically underestimates foreign value added) and points to bm(perspective = "world", approach = "sink") for the Borin-Mancini correction. Cross-references to bm() were added throughout.