ABSTRACT
Immediately after the Second World War, the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, as we like to call it today, was founded with Tinbergen, the founder of macroeconomic model-building,1 as its first managing director. The CPB would be a strictly advisory body, operating both as a central source of economic information within the government and as an independent centre for applied economic analysis. The latter includes monitoring and forecasting economic developments as well as policy analysis. Policy-making is the task of the ministries, the parliament and the government. A distinctive feature of the CPB is that it analyses policy proposals for political parties and other public organizations like employers’ and employees’ organizations, as well as for government ministries.2 These studies tend to be conducted mainly in a medium-or long-term framework.
