Objectives and Potentials of the Dutch Economy in the Eighties

During the last four years, The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR — ‘Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regerings-beleid’) has been preparing a ‘Policy-Oriented Survey of the Future’, which has been described in van Driel et al. (1983). The purpose of the study is to evaluate different options for policy in a number of areas in The Netherlands. To clarify the interrelations between these options, six characteristic views on society and its desired future, related to the main political forces in this country, have been formulated by the WRR. As described in Section 2, the WRR needed a simple economic model which could serve to evaluate and compare the implications of the aspirations of these characteristic views. As such, the use of current econometric models including explicit behavioural relationships, was rejected. The controversialism of these behavioural relations prevented the use of one and the same specific model to test for the attainability of the aspirations of different views on future economic development. A group of scientists of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, in close cooperation with the WRR, designed a meta-model that is tailored to meet the requirements of the WRR. An extensive description of this meta-model and of the results of the experiments has been given in van Driel et al. (1983). The present paper surveys the main results.