Getting Started with Julia
July 25, 2025
This week the USDA announced the closure of the south building with the (potential) intention of distributing employees to other states. This action will inevitably cause a severe reduction in staffing meaning a lot of experienced economists will soon be unemployed. Out of respect for my colleagues, I am going to use this blog post to share resources for those who want to learn Julia and want to use it for economic modeling. I hope this will help those who are looking for new opportunities.
The first and best place to start is Modern Julia Workflows. These posts are a terrific resource for an introduction to Julia. It will help you get VSCode set up, show you how to use the REPL, and give you a good overview of the language. I highly recommend starting there.
The second resource is the summer short course I taught in July 2024. I cover some introductory Julia, DataFrames, Plotting, Julia JuMP and MPSGE. For a professional economist wanting to continue modeling, but can’t afford a GAMS license, this is the resource for you. The information is a year old at this point, so if you run into errors, just reach out, you can find my email information here People.
Third is two GitHub organizations, julia-mpsge and uw-windc. The Julia MPSGE
organization has a ton of examples using MPSGE to model economic
problems, in particular check out the gtap9_in_julia
and the windc_household_model
repositories. The UW-WiNDC organization is the home of the core WiNDC
data and models. The most interesting example is the GTAPWiNDC model,
which has trade flows from G20 countries to the
50 states. You can choose either 32 or
43 goods. Additionally, the WiNDC.jl package is the
recreation of the WiNDC data and build streams in Julia. This package is
a work in progress and I plan to make it better in the next few months.
This is also something I’d like feedback on, if you’re using WiNDC.jl
let me know.
I wish my friends at the USDA the best of luck in their job search. I hope these resources will help you get started with Julia and economic modeling in Julia. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me or the Julia community.