RHOMOLO is the spatial computable general equilibrium model of the European Commission focusing on EU regions. It has been developed and maintained by the regional economic modelling team at the Directorate-General Joint Research Centre (DG JRC) in cooperation with Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO). It is used for policy impact assessment and provides sector-, region- and time-specific simulations to support the EU policy on investments and reforms covering a wide array of objectives.
RHOMOLO (v3) covers all the EU NUTS 2 regions, disaggregating their economies into ten NACE rev.2 sectors, with a constant effort on data updating and maintenance. All the monetary transactions in the economy are included in the model as a result of agents making optimising decision. Goods and services are consumed by households, government and firms, and are produced in markets that can be either perfectly or imperfectly competitive. Spatial interactions between regions are captured through costly trade matrices of goods and services and factor mobility through migration and investments. This makes RHOMOLO particularly well-suited for analysing policies related to investments in human capital, transport infrastructure and innovation.
RHOMOLO is built following the same micro-founded general equilibrium approach as the national DSGE model QUEST, developed by the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), and is often used in combination with it to provide a breakdown of results by region and sector, taking duly into account the specificities of each model. The latest mathematica presentation of RHOMOLO can be found in the JRC Technical Report JRC111861 written by Lecca et al. (2018).
