Work Packages

WP6 A user-friendly economic simulator

The idea of the simulator is to make it very easy to pose policy questions and understand the answers. It will support intuition building dialogue and dissemination. The simulator will be designed to ensure the model is transparent and not a “black box”, make it easy to run experiments and scenarios, collect data, and analyze and visualize results

Policymakers will be able to experiment with policy prescriptions and see the results of their prescription under different scenarios in real time. For a given specific scenario, the simulator will produce a range of possible future outcomes over a given time horizon.

We also plan to build the tool so that it can both be run usefully on a PC on a policymaker’s desk. This will help develop intuition about the system and rapid hypothesis testing. It can also be used on a supercomputer for in-depth analyses of large-scale ensembles of runs.

Key objectives

• Create a simulation based decision-support tool to help policymakers analyze the modeled economic simulations.
• Increase public awareness of non-linear feedback effects in economics.

Deliverables

• D6.1           A specification of the simulator
• D6.2           Prototype simulator
• D6.3           Production version
• D6.4           At least one paper submitted for publication in a top-ranking journal