PSL Initiatives are fundraising initiatives for project development that have the full support of the PSL Leadership Council.
South African data portal: EconData is a single source of South African macroeconomic, banking and financial data, providing access to a growing collection of South Africa data sources. EconData makes it easy to download and update economic time series and automate workflows that draw on this data, using the website, Excel Add-in, R and Python packages and open API. Another unique aspect of EconData’s blog and user guide provides training material for coding to use data programmatically to automate and update analysis or research outputs. EconData is used to automate the SA Nowcast, an automated weekly nowcast of GDP and Unemployment (updated every Friday) based on a mixed-frequency dynamic factor model and 57 core macroeconomic time series. EconData is maintained by Codera Analytics, contactable at [email protected].
State tax modeling initiative: Develop microsimulation models of state income and payroll tax systems that work with the federal Tax-Calculator model to generate combined state and federal liability and model interactions between state and federal taxes. In conjunction with modeling efforts, PSL would produce data representative of taxpayers in each state for use with these models. If you have questions or are interested in supporting this initiative, please contact Don Boyd, Jason DeBacker, or Richard Evans.
Fundamental reform initiative: Enhance PSL-modeling capabilities to include fundamental reforms to the tax system in the United States. This includes modeling consumption taxes such as a value added tax (VAT), carbon taxes, and taxes on wealth. These enhancements include additional modules/functionality of existing microsimulation and macroeconomic models in the PSL community such as Tax-Calculator, OG-USA, and taxdata. If you have questions or are interested in supporting this initiative, please contact Jason DeBacker.
Tax modeling in India: With the support of the World Bank, PSL community members provided more than eight weeks of training to officers and analysts in the Ministry of Finance and the Tax Policy Research Unit (TPRU) in India from 2018-2019. This initiative seeks to raise funding to further support efforts to develop frontier models that will improve the design of tax policy and the budgeting process in India. Working alongside members of the Ministry of Finance and TPRU, PSL members will build microsimulation and macroeconomic models for the government of India that meet or exceed the capabilities of organizations like the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on taxation. The models will be built with open source software and principles and government of India staff will be trained to further develop and maintain the models into the indefinite future. If you have questions or are interested in supporting this initiative, please contact Jason DeBacker or Richard Evans.
If you are interested in proposing a PSL initiative for a new or existing project in the PSL community, please contact PSL Foundation President, Jason DeBacker with the following information: principal investigator(s) name and contact information, name and link to new or existing model(s) involved in the initiative, and a short description of the project (500 words or less). After this information is submitted and reviewed, the PSL Leadership Council will evaluate the proposed initiative.