Abstract: In this report we document the expansion of EUROMOD with child care policies in a selection of EU countries. Child care policies have become increasingly important over the past years, especially to help families reconciling work life with their responsibilities of raising children. The rising participation of women in the labour market urged welfare states to develop and expand child care policies. Concrete child care targets for European countries were set at the Barcelona Summit of 2002. Several countries reformed or expanded their child care policies in the last decade. There are, however, still substantial differences across EU countries in terms of type and coverage of child care policies. To enhance research possibilities with respect to the distributional impact and work incentives of child care provisions, we expand EUROMOD with child care policies. We have extended EUROMOD by calculating the parental fees for formal child care and other possibly related measures such as the tax treatment of these fees. In this note we describe for each country the child care policies in a selection of European welfare states and discuss the assumptions needed for implementation in EUROMOD. The selected countries are Germany, Finland, Lithuania, Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.
The need for more comprehensive and integrated data on individual well-being is widely recognised. In order to identify better measures of economic performance in a complex economy and thus going Beyond GDP, Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi (2009) recommend to consider income, consumption and wealth and to give more prominence to their joint distribution. New household surveys as those developed as part of the Luxembourg Wealth Study and the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Network (HFCS) represent a milestone in the ongoing process to better measure individual well-being. We explore the prospects for using the HFCS dataset as an underlying micro-database for the EU tax-benefit model, EUROMOD. The advantages of this process are twofold. On the one hand, as the HFCS only contains gross income amounts which are not suitable for redistributive analysis, we derive net incomes by simulating the gross-to-net transition with EUROMOD taking into account all important details of the social security and personal income system. On the other hand, we discuss the expansion of new policy domains introduced into the EUROMOD simulations such as wealth taxation, incentives for wealth accumulation and asset tests determining benefit eligibility.
The aim of the project was to build EUROMOD, a tax-benefit microsimulation model covering all 15 Member States of the European Union. This has been achieved, and baseline results are available for 14 countries. (Validated results for Sweden will appear shortly.) EUROMOD has been used for a number of policy-related exercises ranging from studies of the relationship of public spending on social benefits to poverty and the implications of a common European minimum pension, to the impact of welfare benefits on work incentives and the consequences of non-indexation of taxes and contributions. In addition, the model is ready to be used for a wide range of new applications. Not only can it be used to explore the impact of prospective (and hypothetical) changes in social and fiscal policy on poverty and inequality; it can also estimate the cost of reforms, provide options for financing mechanisms, and establish the effect of the reforms in other dimensions such as the work incentives of household members and any implied redistribution within the household. In many ways, EUROMOD is ahead it its time. When the project first started in 1998 (and when the idea was first conceived in 1996) the priorities set at the Lisbon European Council could not have been fully anticipated. It is now clear that the project was timely. EUROMOD is ready to play a role in analysing changes in social and fiscal policies proposed by Member States with reference to agreed benchmarks for the reduction of poverty and social exclusion. The project final report describes in some detail the process of model construction. It was a very complex project that was more demanding for all concerned than could have been anticipated. In some respects it was more akin to an engineering enterprise than a social science research project. In building EUROMOD, particular emphasis has been placed on • transparency of methods: it is therefore open to critiques of the approach as a whole, as well as criticism and suggestion on matters of detail; • designing a model that is flexible and adaptable: to make the range of uses as wide as possible and to maximise the length of its useful life; • consistency and comparability across countries: developing harmonisation of methods, assumptions and input and output concepts is a major part of building an integrated European model. Concretely, it involved: • identifying common structural characteristics in national policies • identifying common data requirements • parameterising and generalising as many aspects of the model as possible, including the definitions of the income base and unit of assessment or entitlement for each tax and benefit, the effective equivalence scales inherent in social benefit payments, and the output income measure. This approach not only allows each system to be modelled in a manner that is comparable to existing national practice, it also provides the model user with a much greater range of choice and greater flexibility than – we believe – is available in any other existing tax benefit model. Before the project began, the degree of experience and expertise with tax-benefit modelling in Member States varied greatly. As is well known, the tax and transfer systems also vary widely in underlying philosophy, as well as in current structure and size. The national sources of microdata with which to build the model were not equally suited to the task. One of the project's most significant achievements is its success in bringing tax-benefit modelling capacity in all Member States up to the level of best practice in the EU.
By the mid 1990s the potential and usefulness of microsimulation models for researching tax benefit systems had found widespread acceptance. Nevertheless models were not widely available for independent or academic research in all countries of the European Union (EU). Even more important, carrying out consistent comparative tax-benefit microsimulation analysis was still an apparently impossible task. The time seemed ready for a European-Union-wide tax-benefit microsimulation model. This paper is devoted to explaining the reasons for building EUROMOD, its added value compared to existing models, the trade-offs faced by its builders and lessons that have been learnt from developing such an integrated model. Moreover, it aims to provide an insight into the wide range of possible applications of EUROMOD, underlined by summarising some indicative findings of studies, which have used the model.
A user interface and a set of interactive visualisations have been created for the standard set of statistical outputs published each year alongside the EUROMOD public release. The visualisations at https://www.microsimulation.ac.uk/euromod/euromod-statistics-dashboard/ present the EUROMOD outputs for the 2019 baseline policy systems as they are implemented in model I2.0+. The user may select any number of countries by which to compare - the default view shows all 27 EU Member States, plus the UK
The aim of the paper is to provide a description of the latest public release of EUROMOD (version F5.0), a microsimulation model of taxes and benefits in the EU. After giving a brief account of the process of constructing EUROMOD, we present headline indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss explanations for differences between these and EU- SILC based indicators. We then compare EUROMOD indicators across countries and as policies evolve across time between 2006 and 2009. Throughout we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results.
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.
[Note:] This paper is an adapted version of the substantive part of the Final Report to the European Commission of the project 'Improving the Capacity and Usability of EUROMOD (I-CUE)', Research Infrastructures Design Study 011859.
A critical study of marronage is urgent since certain anthropological and historical analyses have painted an image of slavery—and therefore of marronage as well—as something of the past. This text will demonstrate that marronage, rather than being simply flight from the plantation in a literal sense, also refers to flight from oppressive institutions through permanent institutional reconfiguration as well as to an existential state of Being. In this text I sketch out ways in which marronage is made manifest within and outside Euromodernity, which I call maroon logics. Maroon logics consists of two interdependent modes of embodying freedom and struggling for liberation. On the one hand there is sociogenic marronage, elaborated by political theorist Neil Roberts in his book Freedom as Marronage (2015), which refers to permanent institutional change as a manifestation of marronage. On the other hand, there is what I call analectical marronage, which denotes resistance to the coloniality of being.
This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version I1.0+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the main reasons for differences between these and EU-SILC based indicators. We further compare EUROMOD distributional indicators across all EU 28 countries and over time between 2015 and 2018. Finally, we provide estimates of marginal effective tax rates (METR) for all 28 EU countries in order to explore the effect of tax and benefit systems on work incentives at the intensive margin. Throughout the paper, we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results. This paper updates the work reported in Tammik (2018).
This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version H1.0+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the main reasons for differences between these and EU-SILC based indicators. We further compare EUROMOD distributional indicators across all EU 28 countries and over time between 2014 and 2017. Finally, we provide estimates of marginal effective tax rates (METR) for all 28 EU countries in order to explore the effect of tax and benefit systems on work incentives at the intensive margin. Throughout the paper, we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results. This paper updates the work reported in Makovec and Tammik (2017).
This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version G4.0+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the main reasons for differences between these and EU-SILC based indicators. We further compare EUROMOD distributional indicators across all EU 28 countries and over time between 2011 and 2016. Finally, we provide estimates of marginal effective tax rates (METR) for all 28 EU countries in order to explore the effect of tax and benefit systems on work incentives at the intensive margin. For a subset of countries for which 2014 EU-SILC data are available in EUROMOD, we also compare poverty and inequality indicators and METR across countries and over time between 2013 and 2016. Throughout the paper, we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results. This paper updates the work conducted in the EUROMOD Working Paper EM3/16.
This paper presents baseline results from the latest version of EUROMOD (version G3.0+), the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the EU-28. First, we briefly report the process of updating EUROMOD. We then present indicators for income inequality and risk of poverty using EUROMOD and discuss the main reasons for differences between these and EU-SILC based indicators. We further compare EUROMOD indicators across countries and over time between 2011 and 2015 (or 2014 in some cases). Finally, we provide estimates of marginal effective tax rates (METR) for all 28 EU countries in order to explore the effect of tax and benefit systems on work incentives at the intensive margin. Throughout we highlight both the potential of EUROMOD as a tool for policy analysis and the caveats that should be borne in mind when using it and interpreting results. This paper updates the work reported in EUROMOD Working Paper EM18/2014.
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.
The purpose of this paper is to set EUROMOD – the EU-wide tax and benefit model - in the context of the development of EU social policy. It explores the relation between the rapidly evolving EU social inclusion process and investment in European social science infrastructure. In so doing, I look mainly to the future, but I would like to begin in Sections 1 and 2 with the historical background. It is only in this way that we can place in context the achievements of EU social policy and understand the need for further development. I then describe in Section 3 the main elements of the EU Social Inclusion process and the National Action Plans of Member States. A key role is played by the social indicators agreed at Laeken in 2001, which are the subject of Section 4. Looking to the future, the monitoring of performance by means of social indicators may lead to the setting of targets (Section 5). All of this relates to process and analysis, but substantive progress requires policy innovation and policy learning. In Section 6, I begin with the assessment of policy at the national level, arguing that there is a role for EUROMOD in analysing the policies of individual Member States on a consistent basis across the EU. The role is clearly crucial at the EU level (Section 7). The potential for policy assessment is demonstrated in Section 8 in the context of a ?new intergenerational pact?, and in terms of working back from possible targets in Section 9. The main lessons for policy analysis are summarised in Section 10.
