Spanish Excellence Network "SIMBIEN" kicks off

The network “Sustainability of the welfare state and intra and intergenerational redistribution of income” (SimBien) seeks to promote synergies and critical mass among Spanish research groups specialized in the analysis of the labor market, inequality and the welfare state in order to address large-scale projects that can respond to the pressing need to make the welfare state sustainable at no expense to employment and economic growth.

SimBien seeks to integrate the explanatory power of macro and micro-simulation to assess the sustainability of the welfare state in a context marked in the short-term by the economic crisis and in the long-term by the demographic transition and the adaptation to the economic globalization. With this, SimBien seeks to find applications to evaluate the impact of public policies on intra and intergenerational income distribution, in order to guide policy in the field of health, education, pensions, unemployment and housing, so as to cope with the new economic and social context.

SimBien unites leading researchers in Spain in the abovementioned fields in order to promote basic research, while developing useful tools. To this end, a wide array of activities –both academic and divulgative- have been designed. The first will allow to improve the research results by means of colaboration and by reinforcing the link with international networks. The second will allow, first, establishing links with the actors invovled in policy making; second, a better combination of available data bases; and finally more resources to face the challengues faced by the social european model.