[wdmmg-discuss] alpha version of "The Budgetizer"

[Tim Hubbard]

Just before budget was announced in June, Lisa, Rufus and i put 
together a simple interactive tool showing the effect of different 
policy options (tax rises or cuts) on the overall deficit.

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/cuts/interactive/

That tool provided a very simplistic view, whereas in reality tax 
rises are staged and effects on incomes, deficit etc. happen over 
time.


To model and visualize this in a realistic way requires a framework 
to handle multiple alternative time series. Rufus and I have been 
working on the first stages of this.

I've been capturing government time series include projections from 
2008, 2010 (before the budget) and 2010 (after the budget), into the 
google spreadsheet below.  Each projection is contained in a 
different sheet.  At present this is only at the level of GDP, total 
expenditure, total taxation, deficit etc.  There's also a description 
sheet which gives a bit of information about the structure.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tFggM4NNja9rSzUd_qQTv9w#gid=4

Rufus has built an initial view of a couple of sheets here.

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/wdmmg-js/src/budgetizer.html

This is very much a first alpha visualisation - will change a lot 
over the coming days - the main thing at this stage is the code to 
read from multiple sheets and visusalise them as graphs.


Even with this simple view, you can see that while the annual 
overspend (expenditure over receipts) falls under the post-budget 
plan, the total deficit remains huge compared to GDP (compared to 
where it has been over the last 30 years)


Having built this, the plan is to add features to allow users to 
interactively experiment with different senarios.  Even doing this 
roughly is quite a lot harder as it requires projecting the 
consequence of changes of policy multiple years into the future.

There are some notes for where we've got to so far here: under = 2010-07-06 =

http://okfnpad.org/wdmmg


In terms of the modelling part, I've done a bit of initial modelling 
of uk taxation, which could be adapted for this - below is the model 
I built to calculate the consequences of cuts for the original 
interactive model.

http://spreadsheets2.google.com/ccc?key=tNM-5i0LoRIK6qhimB3WCUw&hl=en#gid=0

There's a lot more to do to model the impact of other changes...


Comments welcome on the direction of all this!


Ultimately I see this as the start of a long term project to 
construct an open model of the economy - that's good enough to be a 
useful tool to explore policy options.  Spreadsheets with comments on 
cells as to why they are set to the values or formulas they are will 
get us so far - ultimately its going to need a database behind it.

I envisage a platform that can store time series data where each 
item/cell has the equivalent of a wikipedia page (description+talk) 
where the number, or formula (GDP or method of calculating TAX) can 
be debated. I'm thinking of two adjacent cells - a calculated one, 
using the current formulas and a 'current thinking' one, driven off 
the talk page - this allows things like GDP published by different 
groups to be captured/references.  The new spreadsheet has a bit of 
that - a few very simple calculations with the difference between 
that and the official figure or projection also shown.

A lot of my real job, over the last 10 years, has been the Ensembl 
project (http://www.ensembl.org/): developing a database schema 
overlayed by an API representing biological objects to represent 
human genome data.  One of the big strengths of that project has been 
the API, which others increasingly use to carry out research, 
analysing the standardized consistent data which the project provides 
(about 1Tb per release these days).  That's kind of what I think this 
project should evolve towards - but are there any equivalent open 
database/object/API frameworks for economics out there?  I've looked 
but I can't really find one.  Anyone any ideas?

Best wishes,

Tim
-- 
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Dr Tim Hubbard                         email: th at sanger.ac.uk
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute        Tel (direct): +44 1223 496886
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus           Tel (switch): +44 1223 834244
Hinxton, Cambridgeshire. CB10 1SA.     Fax: +44 1223 496802
URL: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/research/faculty/thubbard/
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