In order to prepare for the negotiations on the EU Energy and Climate Package, the Federal Planning Bureau was asked by the Belgian federal and regional authorities to conduct a study on the impact of the January 2008 European Commission's proposal. In the course of this study, various scenarios...

Since 1994 the Federal Planning Bureau has been using the annual version of the econometric model modtrim as a central tool to produce its short-term macroeconomic forecasts. At the origin of the project, and as its name indicates, this annual version was meant to be short-lived and quickly...

Network industries are industries whose activity involves conveying people, products or information from one place to the other via some kind of physical network. They include transport networks, information networks and utility networks. Network industries basically consist of three types of...

We are grateful to our colleagues at the Federal Planning Bureau and to staff at the National Accounts Division of the National Bank of Belgium for their comments and suggestions. We also like to thank Marleen Keytsman for her help in preparing the document. All remaining errors are ours.In this...

The distinction between the young and the elderly within low and high wage earning employment in HERMES, the FPB's medium-term macroeconomic model, enables the assessment of both age and wage related labour cost reducing policies. The age structure of salaried employment in each branch of...

This Working Paper presents the different methodologies currently used to construct a volume index of capital services and analyzes the effects of methodological changes on capital services and total factor productivity estimates for Belgium over the period 1970-2004. The measurement of capital...

Each year, the Federal Planning Bureau (fpb) prepares a medium-term outlook for the Belgian economy with its macro-econometric hermes model. One of the key inputs of this exercise is a baseline scenario for the Belgian international economic environment, which includes an outlook for the output,...