Institute for Fiscal Studies

BBC News Online's Budget 99 website was produced with the help of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The IFS is a politically independent body which aims to "bridge the gap between policy-makers and academics: to bring academic rigour to policy discussion, and policy relevance to academic research".

On Budget 99, it produced the software for the Be Your Own Chancellor and Ready Reckoner simulations.

About Be Your Own Chancellor

This model is an adaption of the model used in the Virtual Economy project.

Virtual Economy (VE) is an on-line teaching project designed to let anyone who is interested learn about the management of a modern economy.

VE was funded by the Nuffield Foundation. It was a collaboration between:

• the ESRC Macroeconomic Modelling Bureau at the University of Warwick,
• the Institute for Fiscal Studies; and
• Biz/ed

Much more information on the economic models used is available on Virtual Economy's Model Information Centre.

The porting of VE to the BBC was led by Jocelyn Paine .

The authors would like to thank:

• Dmitry Leskov of XDS ;
• Ray Fair, author of the FairModel package;