COLMOD training

As part of the SOUTHMOD project, the national team at Universidad Externado de Colombia in collaboration with UNU-WIDER and the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science organizes a training event on the COLMOD model. The event is organised both in person and online. The online training is open to everyone. The training takes place in Spanish.

The purpose of the course is to provide an overview of managing of Encuestas a Hogares survey data using Stata, and analysing the distributional and budgetary effects of tax and benefit policies in Colombia using the COLMOD model.

The training is targeted at existing and potential new users of the model at governmental offices, universities, and research institutes.

About COLMOD

Tax-benefit microsimulation models — which combine representative household-level data on incomes and expenditures and detailed coding of tax and benefit legislation — have proven to be an extremely useful tool for policy makers and researchers. The models apply user-defined tax and benefit policy rules to microdata on individuals and households and calculate the effects of these rules on household income. The effects of different policy scenarios on poverty, inequality, and government revenues can be analysed and compared.

With COLMOD, users can simulate reforms of the Colombian tax and benefit system. They can estimate, for example, the number of beneficiaries and analyse the characteristics of the prospective recipients of a hypothetical benefit. COLMOD also allows users to implement hypothetical income tax and social security reforms and calculate their effects on inequality and the government budget. Existing policies or past policy reforms can be evaluated as well.

This event is part of the SOUTHMOD - simulating tax and benefit policies for development  project. SOUTHMOD project is part of UNU-WIDER's research and capacity building programme on domestic revenue mobilization (DRM), funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (Norad).