ABSTRACT
There is obviously no one kind of arrangement for modelling. The organization of the modelling industry in France is, like that in Norway and the Netherlands, centralized, but the industry developed much later than in the two pioneering countries because indicative planning has played a major role in the state-oriented policy-making of the French government. The economic forecasting is done by two agencies which are part of the Ministry of Finance, namely L’Institute Nationale de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (INSEE) and La Direction de la Prévision (DP). As INSEE combines its function of collecting data with this forecasting function, it can be compared, to some extent, with Statistics Norway. On the other hand, indicative planning in France is the task of the Commissariat Général du Plan (CGP), which is an independent agency but has no executive power. In Germany the major body for economic policy advice is the ‘Sachverständigenrat zur Begutachtung der Gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (SGR)’. This Council consists of five members, most of them are university professors, referred to as the ‘Five Wise Men’. In contrast to the Council of Economic Advisers in the US, the Sachverständigenrat is politically independent. Another major role in economic policy advice in Germany is played by six independent research institutes. They all study the national and international economic developments but they are quite diverse in their fields of specialization and economic perspective. Although the use of models by the research institutes is not documented and seems to play a minor role only, obviously in Germany there is no monopoly in the modelling industry. Models from universities, like the ‘Bonner model’ and the SYSIFO model of the universities of Hamburg and Frankfurt, have in the past been used occasionally for actual policy analysis. However, it must be said that the influence of model-based analysis on the formation of policy in Germany is small compared to other major OECD countries. This is especially true for the ‘Bundesbank’: its policy advice carries a large weight in Germany, but its model seldom seems to be used to help formulate this advice. By comparison, in Denmark, empirical models became part of economic policy-making in the 1970s, when both the Danish Central Statistical Office (for the Ministry of Finance) and the Danish Economic Council began to use models in policy preparation and debate (see Kægård, 1997).
