This paper describes the model MARS, which is the shared property of the DP and the DSS. Currently, MARS aims at planning the general evolution of the first pillar pension scheme for private sector wage-earners, based on macroeconomic and demographic data. It allows to evaluate the impact of...

Keeping public finances on a sustainable foundation while the population ages is clearly a problem in Finland, as in many other western countries. The shrinking of the working-age population, ageing of the labour force, and growth in the number of very old persons form a difficult combination...

The need to develop securities market has, following the recent international financial crises, increasingly attracted the attention of national and international policy makers. Never before have developed and developing countries shared such a strong interest in ensuring the stable growth of...

Investment decision-making is modeled by means of a Kohonen neural net, where neurons represent firms. This is done in order to model investments in novel fields of economic activity, that according to this model are carried out when firms recognize the emergence of a new technological pattern....

For the purpose of determining the influence of the amount of savings circulating in national economy on that economy's growth or drop, a discrete mathematical model with one commodity was developed describing its production as a function of joint investments, depreciation, and introduction of...

Schumpeter maintained that oscillations of macroeconomic variables are only the "secondary wave" of business cycles, a reflex of more fundamental "primary waves" at the microeconomic level caused by the innovative activity of entrepreneurs. Uniting Schumpeter's concern for innovation with...

Concern is growing regarding the poverty impacts of trade liberalization. The strong general equilibrium effects of trade liberalization can only be properly analysed in a CGE model. However, the aggregate nature of CGE models is not suited to detailed poverty analysis. We bridge this gap by...

This paper investigates the usefulness of Italian consumer surveys as estimation and forecasting tool over the period 1982-2003. To this end, standard consumption equations are estimated and then compared, in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample predictive ability, with corresponding models...

The investment acceleration principle is a heuristic for modeling investment time series out of consumption time series. The model presented herein develops a disaggregated accelerator equation whose coefficients are the weights of a Kohonen neural net that represents firms' decision-making....

Using a panel of 439 German regions we evaluate and compare the performance of various Neural Network (NN) models as forecasting tools for regional employment growth. Because of relevant differences in data availability between the former East and West Germany, NN models are computed separately...