UKMOD history

The history of UKMOD goes back to the pioneering work of Tony Atkinson and Holly Sutherland. Their research programme initiated the tax-benefit microsimulation model TAXMOD (Atkinson and Sutherland, 1988), which later became the ancestor of the UK component of EUROMOD, now known as UKMOD.

The first applications of TAXMOD include Atkinson et al. (1988), which examined the implications of applying the British tax system based on personal deductions to the French population, as an alternative to the existing quotient familial. Some years later, Callan and Sutherland (1997) used related modelling approaches to explore the impact of basic income schemes in the UK and Ireland. At that time, however, extending such analysis consistently to a wider set of European countries was not feasible due to limitations of the available national models.

The experience and methodology developed through TAXMOD laid the groundwork for a much larger international project: EUROMOD, the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model (Sutherland and Figari, 2013). EUROMOD applied the same core principles as TAXMOD, but within a fully harmonised framework. It was initially developed for 15 EU member states and later expanded to cover all 28 member states following EU enlargement.

The development of EUROMOD was supported by a succession of European Commission research grants and by the involvement of a large network of researchers from universities, research institutes and government ministries across Europe. These collaborators provided essential national expertise. The management and scientific coordination of the project was led by Professor Holly Sutherland, first with a team based at the University of Cambridge and later at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex.

From 2021 onwards, EUROMOD has been managed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. It remains a key tool for fiscal and social policy analysis across Europe, building directly on the foundations established by Atkinson and Sutherland’s original work. More information on can be found on the JRC EUROMOD website.

UKMOD has replaced the UK component of EUROMOD as a stand alone model, providing a dedicated platform for analysing the UK tax-benefit system while remaining fully aligned with EUROMOD’s underlying framework (Richiardi et al., 2021). UKMOD is being developed by the Centre for Microsimulation and Policy Analysis, at ISER, University of Essex. 

References:

Atkinson AB, Bourguignon F and Chiappori PA. (1988) What do we learn about tax reform from international comparisons? France and Britain. European Economic Review 32: 343-352.

Atkinson AB and Sutherland H. (1988) TAXMOD. In: Sutherland ABAaH (ed) Tax-benefit models. STICERD, London School of Economics.

Callan T and Sutherland H. (1997) The impact of comparable policies in European countries: Microsimulation approaches. European Economic Review 41: 627-633.

Richiardi M, Collado D and Popova D. (2021) UKMOD – A new tax-benefit model for the four nations of the UK. International Journal of Microsimulation 14: 92-101.

Sutherland H and Figari F. (2013) EUROMOD: the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model. International Journal of Microsimulation 6: 4-26.