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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.
As part of the election budgetary costings and impact assessment, the PROMES projection model is used to calculate the fiscal impulse of policy measures within the public health domain. This Working Paper outlines the characteristics, structure and operation of the model. We illustrate the simulation possibilities of the model using the base case and some alternative scenarios.
Working Papers - DC2024_WP_01 (fr), (nl),
In the context of the significant increase in the number of beneficiaries of the health and disability insurance observed over the last 20 years in Belgium, we seek to develop an explanatory model for work incapacity and disability. On the basis of SILC data, we attempt to identify and prioritise the effects of different factors that may influence the probability of employees' transitions between socio-economic statutes, and in particular to and from primary incapacity and disability.
Working Papers - Working Paper 04-22 (fr),
Reports - REP_Pension_202201 (fr), (nl),
The Ageing fund, which was set up in 2001 as an instrument to ensure the long-term sustainability of public finances, was abolished in 2016. Its abolition symbolises the transition from a strategy of pre-funding the budgetary cost of ageing, which dominated in the early 2000s, to a strategy based mainly on reforms to the socioeconomic model. The latter was initiated after the global financial crisis and has been firmly stepped up in recent years. This Planning Paper describes the economic and institutional factors behind the shift in sustainability policy, as well as the role of the various stakeholders: the governments of course, but also the High Council of Finance, the European authorities and the Federal Planning Bureau, which has produced long-term analyses and assessments over the past 25 years that have both reflected and helped to shape the pursued policy.
Closed series - Planning paper 117 (fr), (nl),
Reports - REP_MINIMA_11760 (mix),
In preparation of the 2018 Pension Adequacy Report by the European Commission and the Social Protection Committee, teams from Belgium, Sweden and Italy use their microsimulation models to simulate the possible developments of pension adequacy while taking into account the set of economic and demographic projections developed by the AWG. The results of this exercise complement the AWG simulations of pension expenditures in a context of demographic. The results described in detail in this report were summarised in section 5.1.2. of the 2018 Pension Adequacy Report.
Reports - REP_11732 (en),
Forecasts & Outlook - Economic outlook 2018-2023 (fr), (nl),
Reports - OPREP11700 (fr), (nl), (nl),
This Working Paper analyses various alternative population projections. The first approach shows the impact of alternative future development scenarios for the population growth components. The effects of some of these scenarios on the development in social expenditure and the at-risk-of-poverty rate for pensioners are also analysed. The second approach consists in carrying out a sensitivity analysis of the population projection to some model parameters, in particular the observation periods selected to estimate trends.
Working Papers - Working Paper 01-18 (fr),
This paper proposes a new model to account for unobserved heterogeneity in empirical modelling. The model extends the well-known Finite Mixture (or Latent Class) Model by using the Johnson family of distributions for the component densities. Due to the great variety of distributional shapes that can be assumed by the Johnson family, the method does not impose the usual a priori assumptions regarding the type of densities that are mixed.
Working Papers - Working Paper 14-17 (en),
Forecasts & Outlook - Economic outlook 2017-2022 (fr), (mix), (nl),
Social protection for the costs of long‐term care (LTC) varies widely between countries, and to date there has been no systematic comparison of the experiences of people with LTC needs in different countries. In response to this information gap, the OECD and the European Commission (EC) have established a project to make quantitative comparisons of social protection for LTC in OECD and EU countries, using the typical cases approach. Social protection encompasses both cash benefits, conditional on long‐term care needs, and long‐term care services offered at no or subsidized cost to the user. A data collection questionnaire has been distributed. This report describes how the data for Belgium have been collected. The following schemes are taken into account: the allowance for the assistance of the elderly; the allowances for incontinence and for the chronically ill; the Flemish care insurance; the sickness and invalidity insurance for home nursing care and care in institutions; home care (not nursing care), regulated and subsidized by regional governments; and service vouchers. The data refer to the year 2015.
Reports - REP_PROTSEC_16 (en),
Reports - REP_CEP_03 (mix),
Speeches & presentations - SP20150512_01 (mix),
Forecasts & Outlook - Economic outlook 2015-2020 (fr), (nl), (fr), (nl), (fr), (fr), (fr), (fr), (nl), (nl), (nl), (nl),
Reports - REP_LTMARCH2015_10994 (fr), (nl),
Reports - REP 15-02 (fr),
Reports - REP 15-01 (fr),
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 progress. This variable is approximated using two indicators, the number of new drug approvals (Farmanet data) and the approvals for non-pharmaceutical products (Food and Drug Administration data). With the exception of the latter, all drivers mentioned above increase the cost of curative care. As for long-term care spending, it is explained by income, the proportion of older people in the population and their life expectancy. Long-term care spending is positively impacted by income and ageing. Yet, due to the increase in life expectancy, the impact of ageing shifts gradually towards the oldest age group.
Working Papers - Working Paper 06-14 (nl),
The present document is the fourth biannual progress report in which the Federal Planning Bureau (FPB) gives an account of the monitoring of the economic stimulus strategy announced by the Federal government in the summer of 2012.
This progress report gives an overview of the measures to follow up and reviews the progress of their implementation (situation on June 30, 2014).
Reports - OPREP201403 (fr), (nl),
Since mid-2013, the Federal Planning Bureau has produced a series of studies and simulations at the request of and for the Commission on Pension Reform 2020-2040 under the research contract agreed between the Department Social Security and the Federal Planning Bureau.
Reports - OP_REP_PEN14
The present document is the third biannual progress report in which the Federal Planning Bureau (FPB) gives an account of the monitoring of the economic stimulus strategy announced by the Federal government in the summer of 2012.
This progress report gives an overview of the measures to follow up and reviews the progress of their implementation (situation on January 31, 2014). In addition, the report attempts to provide an analysis of those measures.
Reports - OPREP201401 (fr), (nl),
At the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the National Institute for Health and Invalidity Insurance (NIHDI) asked the Federal Planning Bureau to draft a report on the social impact of public health care and health care insurance. We focused on three specific questions. First, what was the contribution of health care to population health during the past half-century? Lacking sufficient data on other dimensions of health, we look at mortality and life expectancy. Two approaches to this question lead to the same conclusion: the expansion of health care has contributed substantially to the increase in life years. The second question concerns the role of health care in the economy. The value added and employment in the branches Health care and Social services has increased vastly between 1970 and making health care an ever more important part of the Belgian economy . The third question is about the impact of health care and public health care insurance on inequalities in health and income. Among other findings, we report that in Belgium there is no social inequality in the use of general practitioner, though there is in specialist consultations. Also, a fairly large number of older persons have to cope with own contributions to health care that exceed 10% of their income.
Reports - OP_INAMI_RIZIV_14 (fr), (nl),
The state reform was elaborated at a moment when large fiscal consolidation measures were required to restore the long-term sustainability of Belgian public finances. The 2011 institutional agreement provided that the federated entities contribute, through the reform, to the fiscal consolidation. That contribution can be justified by the fact that the reform, by reducing the budgetary size of the federal level, decreases the federal level’s room for manoeuvre and its capacity to resolve on its own the sustainability issue. The magnitude of the contribution necessary to prevent the sustainability challenge from deteriorating is assessed and compared to the redistribution of the public deficit as organized by the reform. The assessment is made in a constant policy scenario and for different assumptions about the reform's life span. This study shows that the transfer of fiscal burden to the federated entities is, a priori, sufficient not to aggravate the sustainability problem considering the reduced size of the federal level’s budget. The federated entities have gained scale and powers but will have to contribute substantially to the efforts to restore fiscal sustainability.
Working Papers - Working Paper 01-14 (fr),
This Working Paper studies the financial and social sustainability of the Belgian social protection system. The results of this publication were presented at the 20st Congrès des économistes belges de langue française and published in the conference proceedings. Assuming no policy changes and against the background of population ageing, the long-term public finance projections highlight an important budgetary challenge. In that framework, this paper examines a number of pathways based on the three pillars of the European strategy as determined during the 2001 Stockholm summit. The budgetary strategy (pillar 1) of the Belgian stability programme in itself does not guarantee the long-term sustainability of public finance and should, therefore, be completed by reforms in support of economic growth (through employment or productivity, pillar 2) or reforms of the pension schemes (as part of pillar 3). The social consequences of the reforms which alter the generosity of the pension schemes should not be overlooked.
Working Papers - Working Paper 15-13 (fr),
Federal Planning Bureau
