The IARIW is offering training sessions immediately preceding the General Conference on the topics of national accounts and micro-simulation modeling on Saturday, August 21 and Sunday, August 22. Details on the sessions are found below. The sessions are open to individual IARIW members as well as employees of IARIW institutional members at no charge. As space may be limited, persons interested are encouraged to register as soon as possible. To register, download and complete this form, save it and then email the form to info@iariw.org. Registrations will be acknowledged within three days.

Session on National Accounts

Session 1: Overview of the system of national accounts, including major macro-economic aggregates

Session 2: Price and volume measurement; (multifactor)productivity

Session 3: General government

Session 4: Households

Session 5: Impact of the revision of international guidelines (SNA 2008)

Session 6: National accounts in a globalising world

Session 7: GDP and beyond: Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report

Session 8: Future developments in the compilation of national accounts

The course will be provided by Peter van de Ven, Director of National Accounts at Statistics Netherlands, and Derek Blades, formerly Director of National Accounts at the OECD. The objective of the course is to respond as much as possible to the questions and needs of the participants. Therefore, participants are strongly invited to inform the course leaders on specific issues that they would like to be addressed during the course. Doing so, one has to take into consideration that the issue must remain quite general as the training session is not directed to persons with extensive experience in national accounts.

Session on Building (and Using) a Tax-benefit Micro-simulation Model: Learning from EUROMOD

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to the steps involved in constructing a tax-benefit micro-simulation model. Participants will be shown how to use the main building blocks provided by EUROMOD, the multi-country micro-simulation model of the EU, to enable a fast-track to building a similar model for their own (or some other) country. The course will include an introductory lecture on micro-simulation and where EUROMOD fits in, but most of the time will be devoted to demonstrations and hands-on exercises with EUROMOD. Data requirements, documentation and a discussion of applications (to encourage possible collaborations) will all be covered.

No specific prior experience is necessary although familiarity with using micro-data from surveys or other sources and some experience with Excel would be useful. We expect to interact with participants in advance of the course so that we can make it as relevant as possible to their interests.

The course will we taught by Holly Sutherland from the Institute for Economic and Social Research at the University of Essex, assisted by Alari Paulus and Horacio Levy.