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To promote transparency and provide information, the Federal Planning Bureau regularly publishes the methods and results of its works. The publications are organised in different series, such as Outlooks, Working Papers and Planning Papers. Some reports can be consulted here, along with the Short Term Update newsletters that were published until 2015. You can search our publications by theme, publication type, author and year.
This rapport was drafted at request by the Strategic Cell of the Ministry of Pensions. The first part discusses the regulatory framework concerned with regularisation of higher education years in each pension scheme. The second part describes the importance of regularised periods of study in the different pension schemes. The data used in the second part were provided by the pension institutions (Federale Pensioendienst, RSVZ).
Reports - RAPPORT_CEP6_11222 (mix),
This working paper presents two analytical applications based on the interregional input-output (IO) table for Belgium for the year 2010. The Federal Planning Bureau constructed this table in 2015 in cooperation with the statistical authorities of the country’s three Regions (IBSA, SVR and IWEPS). The following standard IO analyses based on applying the Leontief model to the interregional IO table are presented here: the derivation of multipliers for each region and the estimation of regional value added and regional employment generated by domestic final demand and exports.
Working Papers - Working Paper 05-16 (fr), (nl),
Reports - REP_CEP2_11081 (mix),
In the framework of the publication of its Economic Outlook for Belgium, the Federal Planning Bureau has estimated the potential growth and the output gap since 2003. This report presents a retrospective analysis of the properties of the short-term and long-term revisions of the potential growth and the output gap. A comparison with the results based on the EC estimations is also provided. This work falls within the legal tasks of the Institute of National Accounts in the field of forecast assessment.
Reports - OPREP201604 (fr),
Within the framework of the sixth state reform, part of the personal income tax has been regionalised. What’s more, in ESA2010, certain tax expenditures which were partly recorded as negative revenue in ESA95 are now recorded as general government expenditure. These changes motivate a revision of the personal income tax model which is used both for the short and medium term projections made by the FPB and for variant analyses. The new model makes a distinction between the "prepayment" tax (payroll tax and advance payments) and the "enrolment" tax (which fixes the amounts due under regional and local additional levies). It provides a better link to the macroeconomy and explicitly takes into account the schedule of tax enrolment.
Working Papers - Working Paper 04-16 (fr),
This report is an input to the preparation of the new Stability Programme and of the new National Reform Programme. It presents the key assumptions and the main results of the preliminary version of the “Economic Outlook 2016-2021”. The final version of the outlook will be published in May 2016.
Forecasts & Outlook - Economic outlook 2016-2021 - March 2016 (fr), (nl),
At the request of the steering committee of the Pension knowledge centre, an overview is provided of how strenuous work is taken into account in the pension legislation of some EU countries. There is no uniform approach to the concept of strenuous work in the different countries under investigation. Two major trends can be identified: a list of strenuous occupations in the older legislations and a list of objective criteria in the most recent legislations. In some cases, these criteria include also criteria of mental strain. With a few exceptions, all systems examined only apply to private sector workers.
Reports - OPREP201603 (mix),
The Federal Planning Bureau and Statistics Belgium have updated their demographic projections. Belgium’s population should grow by about 85,000 inhabitants both in 2016 and 2017. Half of this growth is due to the additional flow of refugees. However important, this population increase is not exceptional; such increases have already been recorded in recent years, for example between 2007 and 2011. Over the long term, the average population growth should reach 40,000 inhabitants a year between 2020 and 2060 (against 50,000 inhabitants over the 1991-2014 period).
Forecasts & Outlook - EFPOP1560 (fr), (nl),
Forecasts & Outlook - Economic outlook 2016 (fr), (nl),
Closed series - Planning paper 115 (fr), (nl),
This paper seeks to understand how the current tax subsidy for the ownership and use of employer-provided cars influence behaviour by its recipients. We first seek to clarify how it affects the choice about cars, i.e. the number of cars a household owns, their engine size and their value. Second, we study the impact of the subsidy on the propensity to use a car for commuting and the number of kilometres driven for commuting and for other, private purposes. The analysis has been made on the basis of the BELDAM survey, a rich dataset on mobility behaviour in Belgium.
Working Papers - Working Paper 03-16 (en),
Reports - OPREP201602 (fr),
Other publications - OPREP201601 (fr), (nl), (fr), (nl), (fr), (nl),
Reports - OPREP201605 (mix), (mix),
This paper analyses the importance of the production of alcoholic beverages for the Belgian economy, with a particular focus on beer. First, the paper provides an outline of the recent development of production, imports, exports and domestic use of alcoholic beverages. This product analysis is complemented by a study of the branch of alcoholic beverages in which production, added value, investments and employment are discussed. Finally, production, revenue and employment multipliers are calculated using the input-output tables for the year 2010, as well as the total contribution of the whole production and distribution chain of the produced and imported alcoholic beverages to Belgian GDP and employment.
Working Papers - Working Paper 02-16 (mix),
Improving the functioning of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) is back on the agenda, especially as the decline in public investment resulting from fiscal adjustment processes implemented according to the current Pact rules is seen as a brake on future economic growth. When discussions about a Pact revision in 2005 were under way, several major authors (for instance: Blanchard and Giavazzi in CEPR February 2004) suggested reverting to a golden rule under which the deficit would exclude investment expenditure, net of amortization. The Pact was revised in 2005 but this proposal was not adopted. This paper presents a new attempt to integrate a proper accounting of investment into the Pact by modifying the formula of the MTO (Medium Term Objective for the budget balance), without losing the other dimensions of the present formula: the partial provisioning of the so-called cost of ageing and the accelerated debt reduction for highly indebted countries. In this way, the public investment programme becomes a centrepiece of the structural policy of a government and not the first instrument of a cyclical policy.
Working Papers - Working Paper 01-16 (en),
In this study, we investigate the exit rates from unemployment associated with different levels of education in Belgium during two periods characterised respectively by high (2002-2007) and low economic growth (2009-2014). Our estimated exit probabilities confirm that the chances of leaving unemployment are substantially higher for young unemployed who have followed post-secondary education. Moreover, the probabilities of leaving unemployment for low- and medium-skilled school leavers considerably deteriorated between the two periods. On the one hand, the penalty associated with lower education slightly increased while, on the other hand, the advantage associated with postgraduate tertiary education reinforced itself. Finally, our results show considerable heterogeneity according to region of residence and gender.
Working Papers - Working Paper 10-15 (en),
Other publications - Input-Output Table 2010 (2015) (fr), (nl),
European Regulation 691/2011 obliges the member states of the European Union to deliver three environmental economic accounts as of 2013. The accounts concerned are the Environmental Taxes by Economic Activity (ETEA), the Air Emissions Accounts (AEA) and the Economy-Wide Material Flow Accounts (EW-MFA).
In this publication the National Accounts Institute presents the EW-MFA for the years 2009-2013.
Other publications - EWMFA 2015 (fr), (nl),
Within the framework of a cooperation agreement between the Federal Planning Bureau and the Federal Public Service Mobility and Transport, the Federal Planning Bureau produces every three years long-term projections of transport demand in Belgium. This exercise, the third of its kind so far, is aimed at making a projection with no change in policy, indicating general long-term trends and allowing to identify elements on which transport policy should be based and to study the impact of transport policy measures.
Forecasts & Outlook - FORTRANSP_15 (fr), (fr), (nl), (nl),
This paper seeks to analyze the long term effects on traffic, environmental quality and public finance of the planned reform of fuel excise duties in Belgium. In the framework of a large scale tax reform, the Belgian federal government will implement an equalization of diesel and petrol excise rates over the 2016-2018 period.
Working Papers - Working Paper 09-15 (en),
Reports - REP_SHIFT_1501 (fr), (nl),
The 2015 Ageing Report includes pension projections made in autumn 2014. For Belgium these did not take into account the new pension reform announced in the Government Agreement of October 2014. By the end of July 2015, all the different components of the reform had been legislated. This Belgian updated projection of November 2015 takes into account this pension reform.
In comparison with the 2015 Ageing Report projection, the revision of the pension cost of ageing is mainly due to the pension reform. Other new measures are also included, mainly the present indexation freeze (implying a 2% decrease of pensions in real terms) and a reduction of public employment (implying some redistribution of future pensioners across the different pension schemes). These updated projections are based on an updated database (more recent version of national accounts data in ESA 2010). In addition, some refinements of the pension models were required in order to simulate the pension reform.
Other publications - REP_COUNTRYFICH2015 (en),
In the context of the ongoing structural transformation of the economy (and a waning global productivity growth), policy makers and authorities in the most developed countries (among which is Belgium) increasingly focus on the digitisation of the economy as a mainspring for a transformation towards a knowledge- and innovation-driven economy. In this sense, the word ‘digitisation’ refers to all social, economic and societal evolutions that follow investments in ICT. As a “general purpose technology” ICT offers opportunities that surpass the pure ICT-industries, and may thus allow for serious heightening of prosperity and societal well-being. Besides the impact upon productivity, further digitisation may offer solutions for a number of complex societal challenges, such as demographic evolutions (ageing), the increasing demand for mobility, the transition towards the production of renewable energy…
Other publications - OPREP201511 (fr), (nl),
This study presents a method for decomposing the annual variation of the debt ratio among the cyclical, structural and one-off components, thus making it possible to identify the structural conditions for a positive or negative snowball effect. The study shows that the cyclical component may be significant and, depending on the year, partially hide the structural component of the endogenous debt development. The method differs from the European Commission method for estimating a cyclically-adjusted debt. Compared with it, our method estimates a cyclical component that is better correlated with the level and variation of the output gap. Finally, the study discusses the advisability and feasibility of taking into account equilibrium inflation and interest rate in the approach.
Working Papers - Working Paper 08-15 (fr),
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