Microanalytic simulation models as tools for legislative planning

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Microanalytic simulation models (or micromodels) are useful tools for analyzing and forecasting the social and budgetary effects of government tax and transfer programs. A micromodel actually models the individ ual units passing through the system, rather than dealing with aggregated statistics. The micromodel derives the overall effects of the system by summing its effects on a representative sample of individual units. This type of model is necessary because the complicated interaction of legal regulations and the socioeconomic structure of the population must be modeled in detail if the simulation is to describe all the significant effects of programs. We used the microanalytic approach to develop a planning system for the German Federal Student Aid Program (BAFPLAN). This project required the solu tion of several important methodological problems. These included: (1) the construction of a data file representative of the initial population, (2) the arti ficial aging of the data file, and (3) the modeling of changes in human behavior. Future research will ex tend the use of micromodels in legislative planning and will deal with the problem of access to the requir ed data.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: