Tell us a bit about you - what is your background?

Martin Mikloš: I studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Oxford and then I did my master’s degree in Economics at the University of Cambridge. I have been working as a policy analyst and researcher at the Slovak Ministry of Finance since my graduation and I specialize on taxation of individuals and research in public and labour economics in general.

Dušan Paur: I studied Economics and Finance at the University of Economics in Bratislava and Nottingham Trent University where I completed my Master degree. I am currently working as the deputy head of the tax policy department at the Slovak Ministry of Finance. My specialization is taxation of individuals and the corporate tax.

When and what was your first contact with EUROMOD?

Martin Mikloš: I got involved with EUROMOD immediately after joining the Ministry of Finance in 2018 and it was one of the first projects for which I was given responsibility. After attending the initial training course at the University of Essex, I gradually took over most of the work on the project from my colleague Dušan Paur. However, I also quickly realised the potential of the model for actual policy analysis as well.

Dušan Paur: I have been working with EUROMOD since 2015. Thanks to EUROMOD I was able to collaborate on the revision of social policies in 2017. I helped to estimate budgetary effects and performed distributional analysis. As Martin joined our team, he took over most of my work with EUROMOD. I am currently mainly Martin’s backup.

What are your main responsibilities and what is your experience with EUROMOD?

Martin Mikloš: I am now responsible for essentially all the steps of the annual EUROMOD update, from the creation of the input data, through the update of the policies, all the way to the final macrovalidation and documentation. However, I also use EUROMOD regularly for distributional analyses of major policy proposals at the Ministry of Finance.

Dušan Paur: With my colleague Martin taking such good care of the annual update, I am now mostly responsible only for the administrative side of the project. Other than that, EUROMOD helps me with policy-related projects and day to day costing of certain reform proposals.

Would you like to share any recent highlights for your country?

We have been working on a major tax-benefit reform in Slovakia over the past 3 years and EUROMOD was a key tool in the process. We used it to model distributional impact of various alternatives as well as fiscal costs of different measures. Thanks to this project, top government officials became more interested in the distributional implications of policy proposals and are now proactively asking for such results. Recently, some of our reports have also caught the attention of the media, so we hope that thanks to EUROMOD, distributional analysis will also become a regular aspect of the public debate over time.