The new Destinie 2 microsimulation model: main characteristics and illustrative results

The Destinie model is a dynamic microsimulation model that has been developed and used at the French national statistical institute (INSEE) since the mid-1990s and whose main application is the analysis of pension policies. The paper presents the new version of the model that is progressively becoming operational. The main goals of this new version have been to improve the robustness and the flexibility of the instrument. This new model has two separate components: (a) a generator of demographic and employment biographies, whose results are stored in intermediate output files and (b) a library of subroutines allowing an easy programming of ad hoc pension projections based on data from these intermediary files. We explain the advantages of this new structure and we provide some preliminary results showing the impacts of the 1993 and 2003 reforms, or of the long-term impact, on pensions, of various post-crisis growth scenarios.