A research team at ISER has won €120k grant to help Flanders evaluate its social and economic policies before and after they are implemented.
The researchers led by leading economist Professor Holly Sutherland are joining forces with a number of other academic institutions within Belgium as part of a larger €3m project funded by the Agency for Innovation through Science and Technology (IWT).
The team will help develop tools that will help policy makers assess the social and financial consequences of policies related to taxes and benefits. The project also aims to get the general public more involved in the discussion of proposed measures by making easy-to-use versions of these tools available to them.
The project will make use of EUROMOD, the highly-sophisticated and adaptable computer-based system developed at ISER that allows researchers to compare the effects of tax and benefit systems across Europe.
Professor Sutherland commented:
“It is fantastic that EUROMOD is being used as the technical framework for this project and to see the excellent work that has been carried out at ISER being used to inform this research.”
And she added:
“Better-informed politicians, policy makers, journalists and the public will make better decisions about these important issues – this work will make a serious contribution in this area.”