Welcome to MicroWELT!¶
MicroWELT is a dynamic microsimulation platform developed for the study of the interactions between welfare state regimes, private and public welfare transfers, and population ageing accounting for educational change, life expectancy differentials by education, and changing family patterns. MicroWELT is developed at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) alongside an international research program studying the distributional effects of four welfare state regimes represented by Austria, Finland, UK, and Spain. The model is part of the WELTRANSIM project, funded by the Joint Programming Initiative “More Years, Better Lives”. Project partners are the University of Barcelona, the Finnish Institute for Economic Research, and the Finnish Center for Pensions.
MicroWELT is a portable continuous-time interacting population model based on data readily available for many countries, most notably the Euromod database. While reproducing existing (Eurostat) demographic projections in aggregate outcomes, microWELT also produces detailed family-demographic and education projections integrated with a longitudinal accounting framework based on the National Transfer Account (NTA) approach. microWELT is fully documented and designed as a modular platform refinable and extendable for a wide range of applications going beyond the WELTRANSIM project.