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Taking the Global View | Centre for Microsimulation and Policy Analysis
Director’s view This publication celebrates the advancing geographical reach and policy impact of EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation platform developed at CeMPA, and the platform now underpinning national models in over 40 countries
Prof Matteo Richiardi
EUROMOD’s flexibility, both of approach and software, means that it can be adapted to shortcut the process of building tax-benefit models with potentially comparable outputs for any country or region
Since 1996, and with generous funding from the European Commission’s DG-EMPL, EUROMOD has been developed as a taxbenefit microsimulation model for the European Union, growing in size as the bloc itself has grown, with coverage extending to all EU member states. The European Commission has come to rely so much on EUROMOD that it has decided to directly involve two of its branches – Eurostat and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Seville – in the update and development of the policies and datasets for the EU member states, taking full responsibility for these models from 2021 onwards, while the platform itself will be co-developed between JRC and CeMPA. But EUROMOD is no longer just a platform for modelling the impacts of fiscal policy in the EU and its member states. EUROMOD’s flexibility, both of approach and software, means that it can be adapted to shortcut the process of building tax-benefit models with potentially comparable outputs for any country or region. In recent years the EUROMOD platform has provided the technical infrastructure behind a brand new set of tax-benefit microsimulation models, beginning with the UK, and then expanding beyond Europe into the Global South. Thanks to funding from the Nuffield Foundation, we have built on the UK component of EUROMOD and improved its timeliness and regional coverage, among other things, reaching a large number of new users including local and devolved governments, parliament and devolved assemblies, public sector bodies, think tanks, research institutes and NGOs. Moreover, as part of the ongoing SOUTHMOD2 project funded by UNU-WIDER, EUROMOD provides the ‘engine’ that powers microsimulation models for seven countries: Ghana, Ethiopia, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ecuador and Vietnam. The same project has also seen updates to existing EUROMOD-powered models for South Africa (SAMOD3) and Namibia (NAMOD4), managed by our long-term collaborators, Southern African Social Policy Research Insights (SASPRI5). We have also been involved in the development of tax-benefit models for another six Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela and Chile), as part of the LATINMOD project supported by CELAG (Centro Estratégico latinoamericano de Geopolítica) with funding by BANDES, the Venezuelan Economic and Social Development Bank, and other individual projects. CeMPA is also involved to various degrees in the development of taxbenefit models6 in countries as diverse as Russia and Indonesia. 2 https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/research/projects/southmod-simulating-tax-and-benefit-policies-fordevelopment 3 https://www.saspri.org/research/micro-simulation/samod/index.html 4 https://saspri.org/SASPRI/research/micro-simulation/namod/index.html 5 https://www.saspri.org/index.html 6 A full list of the models based on the EUROMOD platform is available at https://www.microsimulation.ac.uk/euromod/models
