Estimation of health-related characteristics at a fine local geographic level is vital for effective health promotion programmes, provision of better health services and population-specific health ...planning and management. Lack of a micro-dataset readily available for attributes of individuals at small areas negatively impacts the ability of local and national agencies to manage serious health issues and related risks in the community. A solution to this challenge would be to develop a method that simulates reliable small-area statistics. This paper provides a significant appraisal of the methodologies for estimating health-related characteristics of populations at geographical limited areas. Findings reveal that a range of methodologies are in use, which can be classified as three distinct set of approaches: i) indirect standardisation and individual level modelling; ii) multilevel statistical modelling; and iii) micro-simulation modelling. Although each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, it appears that microsimulation- based spatial models have significant robustness over the other methods and also represent a more precise means of estimating health-related population characteristics over small areas.
Micro-simulation models have been increasingly used for studying various urban and regional processes. Here, two experimental microsimulation models are applied to the study of residential location ...choices of inhabitants of the Tabor micro-region. A wide range of environmental and socio-economic characteristics are analysed for their potential impact on individual residential location choices. The microsimulation approach proves to be useful for analysing not only housing, neighbourhood, and accessibility characteristics, but also of the interactions between the characteristics of the present and potential new residential locations of individual inhabitants and the role of their personal characteristics in their choice of a new residential location. The ability of the micro-simulation models to replicate the observed residential choices is evaluated by several quantitative indicators with special attention given to the stochasticity of the model behaviour, which is a typical feature of micro-simulation models. The limited availability of sufficiently disaggregated data describing the demographics of households, their socio-economic characteristics, and real estate market dynamics needs to be resolved in order to exploit the full potential of micro-simulation modelling in the future.
Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is firmly established in Australian juvenile justice, and legislated conferencing schemes are operating in all Australian states and territories. ...While there is some variation in the terms used to describe restorative justice conferences (e.g., family group conferencing, family conferencing, or youth justice conferencing), there is much more consistency in how the conferencing process is managed across Australian jurisdictions. In Queensland youth justice conferencing is a process that brings together an offender, the victim and their supporters to discuss the harm caused by the offending behaviour and provide the young person with an opportunity to take responsibility for his or her behaviour and make amends. This paper begins by briefly sketching the development of restorative justice conferencing in Queensland and describes the Juvenile Justice Simulation Model (JJSM), a micro-simulation model developed for criminal justice policy analysis in Queensland, Australia. We use this micro-simulation model to conduct an experimental exploration of the effects that youth justice conferencing has on system-wide outcomes for indigenous young people. The model simulates the impact of interventions up until 2011 on the number of finalised youth justice court appearances. Our results indicate that youth justice conferencing is unlikely to reduce the over-representation of indigenous young people in the juvenile justice system. The simulations demonstrated that, by the 2011, youth justice conferencing would result in a 12.5% decrease in finalised court appearances. Unfortunately, this decrease was more apparent for non-indigenous young people (13.7% decrease in court appearances) than for indigenous young people, who had a 10.5% decrease in court appearances. This differential impact of conferencing is due to the different court appearance profiles between indigenous and non-indigenous young offenders, with indigenous young people initiating offending at an earlier age and offending more frequently than non-indigenous young offenders.
The paper demonstrates the influence of the multi-channelpedestrian flow on the actual capacity of a one-lane roundabout,using micro-simulation and discrete functions. The proposedmodel is based on ...the theory of the expected time gap betweenthe units of pedestrian traffic flow, which have the prioritywhen crossing the arm of the roundabout. The proposedmodel represents an upgrade of the previous research in thefield of modelling traffic flows in the one-lane roundabout.Apart from the multi-channel pedestrian flow the disturbancescaused by the circular traffic flow of motorised vehicles at theroundabout are also considered. In this way the model canbetter illustrate the real conditions in traffic. A simulation analysishas been performed on the roundabout arm at KoroskaStreet in Maribor. The results of the analysis have indicated arelatively high reserve of the actual throughput capacity for themain motorized traffic flow in the analysed roundabout arm.The presented model represents a practicable and adaptabletool for planning the roundabout capacity in practice and forthe sensitivity analysis of individual variables on the throughputcapacity of the roundabout.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed, various models have been developed to forecast changes in the outbreak and assess intervention strategies. In this study we validate the Simulator of ...Infectious Disease Dynamics in North Carolina (SIDD-NC) model against an ensemble of proxy-ground truth infections datasets. We assess the performance of SIDD-NC using Spearman Rank Correlation, RMSE, and percent RMSE at a state and county level. We conduct the analysis for the period of March 2020 through November 2020 as well as in shorter time increments to assess both the recreation of the pandemic curve as well as day-to-day transmission of SARS-CoV-2 within the population. We find that SIDD-NC performs well against the datasets in the ensemble, generating an estimate of infections that is robust both spatially and temporally.
•SIDD-NC produces an estimate of infection burden similar to other approaches estimating infection burden in North Carolina.•SIDD-NC generates a robust recreation of the true burden of SARS-CoV-2 infections in North Carolina.•Assemblance of an ensemble dataset functions as a reasonable proxy for ground truth data during health crises events.
In this paper, we investigate the influence of scalability on the accuracy of different synthetic populations using both fitting and generation-based approaches. Most activity-based models need a ...base-year synthetic population of agents with various attributes. However, when several attributes need to be synthesized, the accuracy of the synthetic population may decrease due to the mixed effects of scalability and dimensionality. We analyze two population synthesis methods for different levels of scalability, i.e. two to five attributes and different sample sizes - 10%, 25% and 50%. Results reveal that the simulation-based approach is more stable than Iterative Proportional Fitting (IPF) when the number of attributes increases. However, IPF is less sensitive to changes in sample size when compared to the simulation-based approach. We also demonstrate the importance of choosing the appropriate metric to validate the synthetic populations as the trends in terms of RMSE/MAE are different from those of SRMSE.
Quelle proportion des prestations bonifiées du Régime de pensions du Canada (RPC) se retrouvera dans les goussets des aînés canadiens, une fois ces revenus passés dans le sas du régime canadien ...complexe d’imposition et de sécurité sociale? Dans quelle mesure cette bonification contribuera-t-elle au maintien du niveau de vie des Canadiens à la retraite ? Afin de répondre à ces questions et à d’autres interrogations, l’auteure utilise le modèle dynamique LifePaths de microsimulation de la population canadienne pour projeter les répercussions de la bonification du RPC au moment où elle aura atteint son plein potentiel (années 2070–2074). La bonification accroîtra de 44 pour cent en moyenne les prestations du RPC versées aux aînés canadiens. Pour chaque dollar de prestations supplémentaires du RPC qu’un travailleur aura acquis, environ 62 cents lui reviendront. Cette proportion est à peu près la même pour l’ensemble des Canadiens, peu importe le niveau des gains qu’ils auront réalisés leur vie durant, mais la dynamique varie considérablement lorsque les prestations plus élevées du RPC sont compensées par diverses combinaisons d’impôts supérieurs et de réductions des prestations de la Sécurité de la vieillesse et du Supplément de revenu garanti. Grâce à cette bonification, le revenu de retraite des Canadiens sera plus adéquat, en particulier celui du tiers de la population ne recevant pas de prestations conséquentes de régimes de pensions de l’employeur, si bien qu’une tranche supplémentaire de 12 pour cent de ce groupe aura plus de facilité à maintenir son niveau de vie à la retraite.
How much of the enhanced Canada Pension Plan (CPP) benefit will make its way into the pockets of Canadian seniors, after it filters through Canada’s complex tax and social benefit system as income? How much will it help Canadians to maintain their living standards in retirement? To answer these and other questions, this study builds on Statistics Canada’s LifePaths dynamic microsimulation model of the Canadian population to project the implications of the CPP enhancements at full maturity (years 2070-2074). The enhancements will on average increase CPP benefits by 44 per cent across Canadian seniors. For every dollar of new CPP benefits a worker earns, approximately 62 cents will make it into their pocket. This proportion is reasonably consistent across Canadians with different lifetime earnings levels, but the dynamics vary greatly as larger CPP benefits are offset by diverse combinations of higher taxes and reduced payments from Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement. The enhancements will improve the retirement income adequacy of Canadians, particularly the third of the population without significant workplace pensions in retirement, helping an additional 12 per cent of this group to maintain their living standards in retirement.
When the fiscal situation of a country gets too far out of control, government will often call for a comprehensive review of the tax system to try to get back on a sustainable path. Jamaica is just ...such a case. The Government of Jamaica called in 2005 for a tax reform to address the fiscal problems. The articles in this special issue of Public Finance Review, and this overview, describe the analytic work that was undertaken to support Jamaica’s comprehensive tax reform efforts. The contributions here are in the approach taken, in the analytic work, and in the lessons from these efforts.
Traditionally, pension systems aim to fulfill a number of functions which include income security and consumption smoothing in old age, as well as income redistribution. The main rationale for ...pension reform lies in the interaction between current demographic trends (e.g. increasing old age dependency ratios) and the design of existing pension systems (particularly, the so called Pay-As-You-Go public systems). Under certain conditions, population aging can in fact undermine the ability of a pension system to fulfill those very aims for which it was created, putting pensioners at risks of higher poverty and inequality, besides creating large fiscal pressures on governments and threaten economic growth. In the literature, we find two main approaches to this debate. On the one hand, economic theory helps us formalize the mechanisms through which aging affects a pension system, given its possible features (e.g. type of benefit offered, degree of actuarial fairness or type of financing); it also helps us quantify costs or returns associated to different pension designs and, consequently, to different pension reform options. On the other hand, the policy debate is centered on models of reform which take from concrete country experiences; overall, it focuses mostly on whether funding pensions (i.e. privatizing and individualizing retirement savings, away from Pay-As-You-Go systems) is the best option for reducing many of the negative economic impacts associated to population aging. After having illustrated both sides of the debate – the theoretical and the empirical - our paper makes two main claims. Firstly, the debate should be re-framed away from whether funding is the best option for pension reform in the face of population aging, towards a redefinition of the problem which rather focus on the type of benefit offered, its coverage, its eligibility conditions and actuarial design (as this controls important behavioral and efficiency implications). Secondly, and relatedly, the final impact of a given pension system or reform on future economic variables (i.e. growth, poverty, inequality, financial sustainability) cannot be inferred only by using the tools of economic theory, or the lessons of policy experience. Rather, it requires the ability to quantify the net effects of several interacting explanatory levels, such as country-specific demographic, economic and institutional trends. To this end, we propose the adoption of micro simulation modeling as a well-suited methodology for shedding more light on this important policy debate.
When the fiscal situation of a country gets too far out of control, government will often call for a comprehensive review of the tax system to try to get back on a sustainable path. Jamaica is just ...such a case. The Government of Jamaica called in 2005 for a tax reform to address the fiscal problems. The articles in this special issue of Public Finance Review, and this overview, describe the analytic work that was undertaken to support Jamaica’s comprehensive tax reform efforts. The contributions here are in the approach taken, in the analytic work, and in the lessons from these efforts.
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