This paper presents the models developed at the FPB to project public spending on curative care and long-term care in the medium and long term. The variables explaining curative care spending are income, the age composition of the population, the unemployment rate and technological and medical...

This Working Paper is aimed at describing the current version of Federal Planning Bureau's medium-term macrosectoral model, named HERMES. This model is used to produce on a regular basis medium-term outlooks for the Belgian economy. In addition to the main macroeconomic aggregates (GDP, private...

This paper presents a model of Belgian household consumption, with a focus on private health expenditures. To do so, we have formulated and estimated an extension of the classic Almost Ideal Demand System. The original model has been modified by introducing a dynamic adjustment mechanism and by...

While rising health care expenditures as a percentage of national income is a well-known and widely documented feature across the industrialized world, it has proved difficult to quantify the effects of the underlying cost drivers. The main difficulty is to find suitable proxies to measure...

This paper extends the assessment of the impact of globalisation and technological change on the bargaining power and preferences of employees, by taking worker heterogeneity into account. In contrast with previous studies, two separate unions – representing low-skilled and high-skilled...

In this paper, we assess the impact of international trade on union bargaining power in five EU countries, using a two-step estimation procedure. In the first step, we use firm-level data to estimate union bargaining power at sector level within a production function framework. We simultaneously...

In this paper we propose an explanation for the substantial migration inflows that occurred in North-Western Europe in the 1960s using a modified Heckscher-Ohlin model to show how migration inflows and the product specialisation pattern were linked to the skill premium of countries. In the...