Following eight years of financial support to the University of Essex for the maintenance and development of EUROMOD, the microsimulation model for the European Union, it has been agreed that the European Commission will take over responsibility for carrying out the annual update and release of the EU-wide model. There will be a phased transition process to ensure an effective transfer.
October 2017 marks the beginning of a sustained period of close collaboration and intensive knowledge exchange between the team at Essex and the Joint Research Centre (JRC-Seville) and Eurostat, the Commission institutions that will take over joint responsibility.
Professor Holly Sutherland, Director of EUROMOD, said: “This exciting development is a reflection of the Commission’s commitment to EUROMOD’s long term future and to the value it places on analysis using EUROMOD to contribute to the European Semester, the framework for the coordination of economic policies between the countries of the European Union, as well as for policy-relevant research in general. We look forward to welcoming colleagues from the Commission to work with us in ISER.”
“It demonstrates what a success our project has been and is an indication of the impact
EUROMOD has had. It secures its position to continue for many years to come.”
There is an undertaking that EUROMOD users in the international academic and policy-making research communities will continue to have access to the annual updates of the model for the EU, as they do now.
The transfer of responsibility for country updates will take place in stages and we expect that Essex will retain responsibility for the overall quality and coherence of EUROMOD and the annual release of the updated model until 2020. In the meantime the Commission colleagues will learn about the procedures by working closely with Essex and the EUROMOD national teams on a selection of countries, the number increasing each year.
Alongside the transfer process, and after it is complete, the team at the University of Essex will continue to work at the forefront of innovations in the use of microsimulation for policy analysis and development, making use of EUROMOD across a range of research agendas, as well as developing the platform for use elsewhere in the world.