MONIAC Guatemala — Hydraulic Economic Model
Physical hydraulic model of the Guatemalan economy, calibrated from Banguat's COU data
Context
In 1949, A.W. Phillips built the MONIAC — a physical hydraulic machine that simulated the British economy through flows of colored water. We are building a Guatemalan version: a physical hydraulic model that represents the structure of the Guatemalan economy, designed both as an academic instrument and as a public-facing artifact for economic literacy.
What I did
I lead the data analysis side. My responsibility is taking the COU (Cuadro de Oferta y Utilización — supply and use tables) datasets published by Banguat (the Guatemalan central bank), processing them in R, and translating the structural relationships of the Guatemalan economy into the parameters that the hydraulic model needs to physically represent.
How it works
The COU describes how each economic sector produces, consumes, and trades. My pipeline (built in R and RMarkdown) cleans the Banguat data, computes intersectoral flows, and outputs the proportional flow rates that the physical model's pipes and reservoirs are calibrated against. The physical machine is being built in parallel by a separate sub-team.
Outcomes
Active build. The combination of public-source economic data, structural modeling, and physical fabrication is what makes this project unusual — it sits at the intersection of industrial engineering, economics, and public communication of complex systems.