ABSTRACT
The essays on empirical models and policy-making contained in this volume were presented at the 10th Anniversary Conference, in Amsterdam, of the foundation of the Tinbergen Institute. As part of the final day of the conference, we (the conference organisers and editors of this volume) arranged a panel discussion to explore policy makers’ perspectives on their experiences of the modelling-policy interaction. Our three panellists and chairperson were all invited because they have experience of public policy-making from very high up inside governmental organizations but are also academic economists. We provided four questions in advance to our panellists, with the idea that this would help them to focus on the issues which formed our conference agenda, namely the nature of the two-way interaction between empirical models and policy-making. Our four questions were as follows: 1 There is a wide difference between countries in the experience of using empirical
models in the policy process. What, in your experience, is the main way in which economic policy makers use empirical economic models?
