This paper develops a wavelet-based control system model that can be used to simulate fiscal and monetary strategies in an open economy context in the time-frequency domain. As the emphasis on real exchange rate stability is increased, the model simulates the effects on both the aggregate and decomposed trade balance under both constant and depreciating real exchange rate targets, and also the effects on the real GDP expenditure components. This paper adds to recent research in this area by incorporating an external sector via the use of a real effective exchange rate as a driver of output. The research is also the first to analyze exchange rate effects within a time-frequency model with integrated fiscal and monetary policies in an open-economy applied wavelet-based optimal control setting. To demonstrate the usefulness of this model, we use post-apartheid South African macro data under a political targeting design for the frequency range weights, where we simulate jointly optimal fiscal and monetary policy under varying preferences for real exchange rate stability.
This paper uses wavelet-based optimal control to simulate fiscal and monetary strategies under different levels of policy restrictions. The model applies the Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) to United States quarterly GDP data, and then uses the decomposed variables to build a large 80 dimensional state-space linear-quadratic tracking model. Using a political targeting design for the frequency range weights, we simulate jointly optimal fiscal and monetary policy where: (1) both fiscal and monetary policy are dually emphasized, (2) fiscal policy is unrestricted while monetary policy is restricted to achieving a steady increase in the market interest rate, and (3) only monetary policy is relatively active, while fiscal spending is restricted to achieving a target growth rate. The results show that fiscal policy must be more aggressive when the monetary authorities are not accommodating the fiscal expansion, and that the dual-emphasis policy leads a series of interest rate increases that are balanced between a steadily increasing target and a low, fixed rate. This research is the first to construct integrated fiscal and monetary policies in an applied wavelet-based optimal control setting using U.S. data.
This paper first applies the MODWT (Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform) to Euro Area quarterly GDP data from 1995 – 2014 to obtain the underlying cyclical structure of the GDP components. We then design optimal fiscal and monetary policy within a large state-space LQ-tracking wavelet decomposition model. Our study builds a MATLAB program that simulates optimal policy thrusts at each frequency range where: (1) both fiscal and monetary policy are emphasized, (2) only fiscal policy is relatively active, and (3) when only monetary policy is relatively active. The results show that the monetary authorities should utilize a strategy that influences the short-term market interest rate to undulate based on the cyclical wavelet decomposition in order to compute the optimal timing and levels for the aggregate interest rate adjustments. We also find that modest emphasis on active interest rate movements can alleviate much of the volatility in optimal government spending, while rendering similarly favorable levels of aggregate consumption and investment. This research is the first to construct joint fiscal and monetary policies in an applied optimal control model based on the short and long cyclical lag structures obtained from wavelet analysis.
This paper aims to provide an introduction to the current state of the art of EUROMOD, the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model. It explains the original motivations for building a multi-country EU-wide model and summarises its current organisation. It provides an overview of EUROMOD components, covering its policy scope, the input data, the validation process and some technical aspects such as the tax-benefit programming language and the user interface. The paper also reviews some recent applications of EUROMOD and, finally, considers future developments.
Effective e-Government can contribute to the modernization of the public sector administration, and increase the efficiency in the activity of governments and national agencies facilitating the participation of citizens in the social and political life.The use of e-Government improves the electronic transactions between government agencies, companies and citizens, in order to improve the quality of the services and to increase the transparency in the public financial sector. The recent reforms in the public financial management are accelerated by new technologies and are creating the premises for a disciplined, transpired and flexible public sector administration.After a presentation of recent views from literature on some main problems of e-government and software services, the research is focused on the development of e-government and public finance administration.
The popularity of online behavioral experiments grew steadily even before the COVID-19 pandemic. With the start of lockdowns, online studies were often the only available option for the behavioral economists, sociologists and political scientists. The usage of most well-known platforms such as mTurk was so intensive that it harmed the quality of data. But even before the pandemics-induced quality crisis, online studies were limited in scope, since real-time interactions between participants were hard to achieve due to the large proportion of drop-outs and issues with creating stable groups. Using the crowdsourcing platform Toloka, we successfully ran several multi-round interactive experiments. Toloka's large online audience, relatively low exposure of participants to sociological surveys and behavioral studies, and a convenient application programming interface makes it a perfect tool to run behavioral studies that require real-time interactions of participants.
This paper introduces the Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT), a new extension of EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union. With HHoT, users can easily create their own hypothetical data, which enables them to better understand how policies work for households with specific characteristics. The tool creates unique possibilities for an enhanced analysis of taxes and social benefits in Europe by integrating results from microsimulations and hypothetical household simulations in a single modelling framework. Furthermore, the flexibility of HHoT facilitates an advanced use of hypothetical household simulations to create new comparative policy indicators in the context of multi-country and longitudinal analyses. In this paper, we highlight the main features of HHoT, its strengths and limitations, and illustrate how it can be used for comparative policy purposes.
Assessing the quality of microsimulation models is an important contributing factor for motivating their use in both academic and policy environments. This is particularly relevant for EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union, because it is intended to be widely used. This paper explains how the quality of EUROMOD is assessed. It focusses on the validity and scope of results as particularly important dimensions of quality, and on the transparency with which this assessment is done. It also provides evidence on the extent and breadth of the use of EUROMOD. Some of the key trade-offs between different aspects of quality are identified and the paper concludes with a view on the appropriate division of responsibility for quality assessment, between model developers and users.
Nowadays Russian government pays a lot of attention to solutions of the high energy intensive production system in the country. The key factors of low efficiency of regional energy saving programs is the lack of approved standards and algorithms in the area of energy audit. In practice, both technical and economical parameters of energy audit fluctuate in a very large range. It's due not only to different complexity of the audit but also the immaturity of the market. General population in Russia on its own has not yet embraced energy efficiency as a social value, therefore not many people are interested to invest in increasing energy efficiency of their homes and, therefore, to use algorithms for home energy audit suggested by well-known western companies such as Energy Star and others. New energy efficient home appliances can significantly reduce the energy consumption, however, the extent to which the theoretical reduction potential can be realized highly depends on individual decision processes. In this situation most of the small and middle-size companies as well as government organizations are getting more and more interested in some 'do-it-yourself' tools that can help to make very first steps in introduction of energy management systems and reduce the cost of professional energy audit. In this paper we present a simple interactive calculator, which can be used in individual flats and houses, office buildings and educational institutes such as colleges and schools, for assessment of electricity use by different categories of equipment. The user indicates only type of equipment and its approximate time of work. The program outputs the structure of energy consumption in graphic format. The results of test procedures and the ways for improvement of the program are discussed. The program is realised using the C++ programming language following the C++03 standard. It uses Qt libraries and provides graphical output in the form of a histogram, showing which energy appliances consume the most energy.
This paper introduces a generalised model building platform (MMEANS) for implementing and using tax-benefit microsimulation models. It is designed to aid in the construction of single- and multi-country tax-benefit models by providing all essential components and a system by which these can be parameterised and combined into a full model. We explain the conceptual and computational issues arising in the design and development of MMEANS. One application of the software has been to construct EUROMOD, a 15 country European tax-benefit model (Immervoll et al., 1999; Sutherland, 2001). However, we argue that, apart from its direct usefulness for this model, MMEANS can be used as a general software tool for microsimulation model building.
A stable government is by definition not dominated by any other government. However, it may happen that all governments are dominated. In graph-theoretic terms this means that the dominance graph does not possess a source. In this paper we are able to deal with this case by a clever combination of notions from different fields, such as relational algebra, graph theory, social choice and bargaining theory, and by using the computer support system RelView for computing solutions and visualizing the results. Using relational algorithms, in such a case we break all cycles in each initial strongly connected component by removing the vertices in an appropriate minimum feedback vertex set. So, we can choose an un-dominated government. To achieve unique solutions, we additionally apply social choice rules. The main parts of our procedure can be executed using the RelView tool. Its sophisticated implementation of relations allows to deal with graph sizes that are sufficient for practical applications of coalition formation.
We explore the prospects for using the EU-SILC as the underlying micro-database for policy simulation across the EU. In particular we consider the issues to be addressed, and the advantages arising, from building a database from the EUSILC for the EU tax-benefit model, EUROMOD. In order to identify the issues and illustrate their importance a trial database for Spain is constructed. It is used within EUROMOD to calculate some selected social indicators as well as indicators of work incentives and the effects of fiscal drag in Spain between 2003 and 2006. We conclude that, although transforming the EU-SILC into a database for EUROMOD would require a significant amount of effort, this is likely to be worthwhile because of the consequential improvements in comparability across countries, efficiency in developing and maintaining the model for many countries and simplification of access arrangements. We therefore offer some suggestions for how to improve the User Database for this purpose.