A research team at ISER has won €120k grant to help Flanders evaluate its social and economic policies before and after they are implemented.

The researchers led by leading economist Professor Holly Sutherland are joining forces with a number of other academic institutions across Europe as part of a larger €3m project.

The team will help develop tools that will help policy makers assess the social and financial consequences of policies related to taxes and benefits. The project also aims to get the general public more involved in the discussion of proposed measures by making easy-to-use versions of these tools available to them.

The project will make use of EUROMOD, the highly-sophisticated computer-based system developed at ISER that allows researchers to compare tax and benefit systems in 19 European countries.

Professor Sutherland commented:

'It is fantastic that EUROMOD is being used as the framework for this project and to see the excellent work that has been carried out at ISER being used to inform this research.'  And she added: 'Better-informed politicians, policy makers, journalists and the public will make better decisions about these important issues – this work will make a serious contribution in this area.'