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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.
December 22 2017, the Federal Planning Bureau received an assignment from the federal minister of Energy, Mrs. Marghem, to perform a new study. The occasion was the appearance of the joint Vision document elaborated by the four Ministers of Energy and the subsequent demand for additional calculations by some stakeholders. The main task of this supplementary study then consists in analysing the impact of four predefined electricity scenarios with horizon 2030 on a number of socio-economic indicators.
Reports - OPREP201802 (mix),
The 2017 Federal Report on Sustainable Development takes as its starting point the Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) adopted at the UN. The report assesses 34 indicators showing the evolution of Belgium towards the SDGs and examines the gap between existing scenarios and the SDGs in 3 areas: poverty, energy and transportation. Current developments usually go in the right direction, but most often lag far behind the quantified objectives.
Reports - Sustainable development Report 2017 (fr), (nl),
The supplementary table 29, “Accrued-to-date pension entitlements in social insurance” of the Eurostat transmission program covers the statutory pensions and occupational pension schemes in social insurance in Belgium. In a working paper that was published May 2017, the Federal Planning Bureau presented a first methodology to complete the columns on the statutory pension schemes. Following this publication and the preliminary data transmission towards Eurostat mid-2017, the decision was taken to change the model and implement the PBO-methodology. Moreover, the first model contained an error in the programming part which lead to an overestimation of the accrued rights. This error has been corrected for. Consequently, the accrued-to-date pension entitlements are lower than the ones presented in the working paper.
Reports - REP_11311 (en),
At the request of the federal Minister of Energy, this report was carried out as a follow-up on the cost-benefit analysis published by the Federal Planning Bureau in February 2017. It constitutes an addendum to the February study in that some additional questions impacting the Belgian production park are scrutinized in detail. Four topics are dealt with. The first one concerns the impact of an increase in the Belgian cross-border transfer capacity by 2 GW on the functioning of the domestic flexible thermal park. The effect this will cause on the full load hours, the system marginal cost, CO2 emissions, the required volumes of natural gas and employment is studied. Second, the report assesses the cost of keeping currently existing gas-fired power plants operational and provides a comparison with the cost of building new flexible and reliable units. Third, the socio-economic impact of an increased risk of a black-out is scrutinized. The economic asymmetry this induces in relation to the costs and benefits of maintaining sufficient domestic capacity to comply with the legally defined Loss of Load (LOLE) criterion of 3h is documented. Finally, the question of premature closure of currently existing Belgian gas-fired power plants that have not yet reached the end of their operational lifetime is investigated by means of different indicators throughout the paper.
Reports - CBA_201702 (en),
Reports - REP_CEP8_11421 (mix),
In this report, different capacity portfolio and import scenarios for Belgium are investigated. They are based on the reports published by the Belgian transmission system operator Elia in 2016. Four scenarios are scrutinized differing in their overall context (level of carbon price) and/or in the choice of the content of their structural block. A fifth scenario is added which constitutes a sensitivity analysis: in this scenario, a considerable amount of new natural gas-fired power plants on top of the structural block is built on the Belgian territory in order to study the impact of a fairly lower level of (net) imports and even explore the net export option. The five scenarios are compared in order to assess potential longterm strategic choices from a societal perspective.
Reports - CBA_2017 (en),
This paper constitutes the contribution of the Federal Planning Bureau to the round table discussion with the Interdepartemental Commission for Sustainable Development of 11/2/2016 as part of task 1.3 of the SUSPENS research project. This paper gives a brief description of the climate and social policy in Belgium. The focus is on the policy goals to which Belgium has committed itself and on how far these have been achieved. The analysis shows that Belgium will have to make considerable efforts to achieve these goals and that cross-border cooperation will be necessary to realise the transition towards a low-carbon society.
Reports - REP 11362 (nl),
Reports - REP_11361 (mix),
Reports - REP 11379 (mix),
Reports - REP 11301 (mix),
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_CEP4_11186 (mix),
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),
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),
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),
Reports - OPREP201602 (fr),
Reports - OPREP201605 (mix), (mix),
Reports - REP_SHIFT_1501 (fr), (nl),
Reports - REP_CEP_03 (mix),
This report presents the results of an impact assessment of an increase in the social integration allowance (assistance scheme). The study which was commissioned by the State Secretary responsible for poverty reduction consists of two parts, on the one hand, an assessment of the macroeconomic and budgetary effects, including the possible return effects, of the increase and, on the other hand, an estimate of its impact on the poverty risk.
Reports - OPREP201512 (mix), (mix),
The Royal Decree of 21 March 2014 (Belgian Official Journal of 27.03.2014, pp. 26734-26739) lowering the VAT rate on electricity supply to residential customers from 21% to 6% provides that this measure has to be assessed by the Ministerial Council by 1 September 2015 at the latest. In this context, this report puts forward an assessment of the macroeconomic and budgetary impact of the measure.
Reports - OP20150723 (mix),
Since a couple of decades, the pension policy of member states is a focal point of attention on the European level. Securing financial sustainability by the AWG requires a prospective vision on ageing, labour market developments and social policy. But a sensible assessment of financial sustainability cannot do without taking into account the prospect ive development of pension adequacy. The SPC does this through prospective theoretical replacement rates and benefit ratios. However, prospective values of the key ISG indicators, such as the risk of poverty rate or the Gini are not available.
Reports - REP_SIMUBESEHU0515 (en),
Reports - REP_LTMARCH2015_10994 (fr), (nl),
The 7th Federal report on sustainable development, Making our consumption and production sustainable, in Part A assesses current evolutions towards the sustainable development objectives. In Part B, it explores two scenarios for transition towards a sustainably developing Belgium and world in 2050. A key element of this Report is the Federal long-term strategic vision for sustainable development (LTV SD) adopted by the government in 2013, which contains 55 objectives that describe a sustainably developing Belgium in 2050.
Reports - Sustainable development Report 2015 (en), (fr), (fr), (nl), (nl),
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