We analyse the impact of the recent inflation surge on the welfare of Slovak families. Combining a microsimulation model SIMTASK with Household Budget Survey data lets us quantify the net effect of the shock after government relief measures and adjustments in wages and social transfers. In line with literature, we show that government measures along with automatic valorisation mechanisms helped to offset welfare decline mainly for low-income families. For high-income families wage growth was the crucial component offsetting their purchasing power drop. Considering inflation-related effects solely, our results indicate a welfare drop of 7% for an average family in 2022. The reversed result for 2023 (increase by 5%) is mainly due to the delay in economic adjustments. On the two-year horizon, the combination of policy measures and economic adjustments, on average, almost fully mitigated the negative effects of the inflation surge. Assessing total changes (also including inflation-unrelated effects), an increase in disposable income exceeded the inflation burden significantly for all analysed family categories. A generous permanent income support for families with children was the main driver of the welfare increase of 9% on average. We also point to high heterogeneity of the impact across families. Despite positive average effects, 14% of families faced a welfare drop.

While innovation supply is creative, unpredictable, and not necessarily related to future economic usefulness, resource provision is focused on economic returns, experience based and narrower, implying a positive economic risk of not understanding innovative commercial winners. We demonstrate through simulation experiments on an economy wide firm-based model that industrial growth is explained by industrially competent identification and financial support of winners that are carried on to industrial scale production and distribution. The simulations capture the dynamic economic systems effects on the entire economy, from micro responses to macro and the feedback on micro behaviour of expectational mistakes. Competence bloc theory is used to model the supply of innovations and their commercialization in what we call an Experimentally Organized Economy. We demonstrate that lack of commercialization competence, notably industrial competence embodied in venture capitalists´ ability to identify, select and finance radically new innovations breaks the conventionally assumed linearity between innovation supply and economic growth. We also demonstrate the existence of long-term and possibly very large losses in output from the loss of winners during the commercial filtering of the competence bloc, and that the economy wide costs incurred by protecting losers may be large.

Recent media coverage has highlighted the difficulties of estimating poverty accurately. The concept of 'poverty' is not easy to define and even once it is defined it is not easy to measure in a way that is true to the definition. In An Introduction to Poverty Measurement Issues Harry Greenwell, Rachel Lloyd and Ann Harding survey the steps required to produce poverty estimates and highlight the limitations or assumptions associated with each step.

We document the development and operation of the SWITCH model, Ireland's taxbenefit microsimulation model. Using the EUROMOD platform and process of creating an input model, we discuss adjustments to the underlying data, such as reweighting and uprating, aiming at improving representativeness in terms of the income tax base and beneficiaries of social welfare schemes. The validation of the model with respect to a range of external sources as well as the capabilities of the model in terms of results produced is also described.