The Institute for Fiscal Studies, Biz/Ed, and Oxford Economic Forecasting (OEF), with support from the Nuffield Foundation, today announced the release of Virtual Economy II (VE II), an updated version of the popular on-line service that puts you in the shoes of Gordon Brown.

VE II puts in the hands of the public two large-scale simulation packages, formerly available only to government and research institutions:

• A version of the IFS Tax and Benefit model, which simulates the effect of changes to taxes and benefits on British households, and which was used most recently to produce the IFS Green Budget 2000; and
• a version of the Treasury's macroeconomic forecasting model, which predicts the effects of tax and interest rate changes on inflation, growth and unemployment using the Treasury's own assumptions.

VE II is a development of the original Virtual Economy (VE I), launched in March 1999. The new release features updated versions of the models and new user-interface technology which allows the kind of interaction and responsiveness that users brought up on computer games such as Sim City or Civilisation have come to expect. A version using current, simpler technology will also be maintained.

VE I has been a considerable success: it has been run over 70,000 times and has been particularly widely used in schools, colleges and universities as part of Business and Economics A Level and degree courses. VE I itself developed from the IFS's Be Your Own Chancellor web model, which was the first of its kind when first launched in 1995, and ultimately from the famous Phillips Machine now found in the Science Museum.

IFS Director Andrew Dilnot said, "We've been delighted by the popularity of Virtual Economy. It is central to IFS's aims that we produce accessible information, not only to policy-makers and academics, but to all members of the community, including those still in education. The VE model can give everyone a unique insight into the way an economy works."

OEF Director Adrian Cooper said, "We're delighted that Virtual Economy allows a sophisticated macroeconomic model of the UK economy to be used over the internet by a wide audience, who can experiment with the tools of economic policy and see the impact of their changes on the economy quickly and easily."

Ends

Notes to editors

1. The VE II launch event will be held at 12 o'clock on Wednesday 1st March at the IFS, 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE. Contact Emma Hyman if you would like to attend.
2. VE II will run on any computer which is connected to the internet and capable of running Java (TM) 1.1. This includes almost all PCs running Windows 9x or above or other operating systems such as Linux or BeOS, as well as most Apple Macs. A simpler "CGI" version will still be available for other users. Pre-release versions of VE II will be available from the VE site during February.
3. Java is a trademark of Sun MicroSystems and Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corp.