Innovative start-ups are central to economic dynamism and the mastering of societal challenges such as climate change – they turn ideas into marketable products without having to consider the cannibalisation of existing products. At the same time, the EU and Austria lag behind countries such as the USA in the presence and growth dynamics of such start-ups. More economic research is needed to inform economic policies aiming at counteracting this trend. The literature emphasises the lack of holistic approaches to start-up analysis. This research project has the opportunity to follow the start-ups of the Venture Capital Fund of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in real time and thereby obtain unique data.

Als Basis für eine mittelfristige Schätzung des Qualifizierungsbedarfs erarbeitet das WIFO regelmäßig Prognosen der Beschäftigungsentwicklung nach Berufsgruppen, Branchen und Geschlecht. Dazu wurde eine modellgestützte Prognoseinfrastruktur aufgebaut. Die aktuelle Berechnung deckt den Zeitraum 2021 bis 2028 ab und bietet eine detaillierte Prognose für 38 Branchen und 59 Berufsgruppen. Auf Ebene der neun Bundesländer werden neben 38 Branchen 27 Berufsgruppen unterschieden.

Economic sanctions are increasingly used in current international policy conflicts; they are employed as substitutes to more conventional military tools ("War by Other Means"). Evidence on their political effectiveness, on the distribution of macro- and microeconomic costs, and on their optimal design is, however, scarce. Current developments in international politics underline the importance of better data and better analysis to guide policymakers in different fields of Austrian and European politics.

In this project, we aim at assessing the impact of carbon pricing on firms and households in Austria using a novel macroeconomic agent-based model (ABM) with an extraordinary level of granularity. The ABM will be calibrated on administrative datasets that have become available through the Austrian Microdata Center (AMDC). Newly available registry-based household and firm data will allow us to parameterize the ABM to accurately represent the entire population of Austria at an unprecedented level of granularity. This would be a major step towards creating a full "digital twin" of a national economy to be used as a tool for assessing the distributional impact of climate policy on individual firms and households, with a focus on the heterogeneity of such effects across socioeconomic characteristics.

Der Rahmenvertrag sieht die Bereitstellung von externer Expertise für das Bundesministerium für Klimaschutz, Umwelt, Energie, Mobilität, Innovation und Technologie vor, mit Fokus auf die Bereiche "Mobilität, Verkehr, Technologie" und "Umwelt, Klima und Energie". Die Leistungen umfassen dabei empirische Analysen und (umwelt-)ökonomische Modellierung, Maßnahmenanalyse und Politikempfehlungen, sowie die Erstellung von Research Briefs zu aktuellen Themen.

WIFO provides evaluation and impact assessment services to DG ECFIN under this framework contract.

SUSTAINWELL addresses the long-term socio-economic impact of population ageing on European society. The aims of this project will be to identify: first, opportunities arising from longer and healthy life expectancy and in general from the silver economy; second, resilient responses from individuals and households (in market and non-market outcomes) and from other actors in society facing the challenges posed by ageing; third, the impact of ageing on inequality (both within and between generations), knowing that social cohesion is crucial to face the ageing challenge; fourth, gender and lifecycle balanced policies helping the sandwich-generation to sustain baby-boomers entering retirement, without decreasing fertility nor investment in education. Particular attention will be devoted to the role of job design to foster intergenerational complementarities in the labour market. To better understand the benefits of living longer, SUSTAINWELL will take a holistic perspective by: investigating the behavioural reactions in key lifetime decisions along the lifecycle (education, skills, fertility, work effort, home production, savings and retirement) and the decision process itself leading to prosocial behaviour; and accounting for the three ways to provide welbeing along the lifecycle (market, family and welfare state). Both dimensions will be analysed by extending the National Transfer Accounts method (using comparable EU datasets) to be incorporated as inputs in a dynamic microsimulation comparative model quantifying the future of ageing societies. The project will take a new multidisciplinary approach in different basic (Neuroscience) and social sciences (Economics, Demographics, Sociology and Political Science). The results of the project will be pursued in permanent contact with stakeholders, to deliver knowledge and evidence-based policy measures by applying a participatory design and co-creation activities.

The goal of the project is therefore to allocate the emissions levels that will apply in the future to emission pathways for the building sector and to enable a quantitative assessment of the necessary transition measures.

Q2-PATHWAYS improves the understanding of deep-structural transformational change by innovatively enriching quantitative with qualitative analyses. The policy objective is to elaborate transformation pathways that are equitable, responsible, resilient, environmentally friendly and socially inclusive by transdisciplinary visioning and strategising with practitioners from policymaking, business and civil society. This aims at broadening the objectives of and the visions for climate policies by advancing from striving for a net-zero economy to aiming at climate-friendly living defined as a good life for all within planetary boundaries and overcoming climate-only policies that remain in a policy silo and putting climate politics at centre stage in a broader societal transformation towards sustainability. The scientific objective is to elaborate a holistic approach to societal transformations by integrating quantitative and qualitative climate research. This endeavour combines inter- and transdisciplinary research: first, Q2-PATHWAYS calibrates existing narratives and transformation pathways based on contemporary research and its transdisciplinary visioning and strategising approach. Second, it calibrates an integrated model of the electricity sector and the macroeconomy with the help of high-level experts mainly from the Second Austrian Assessment Report. Third, three transformation pathways will be modelled with the aim of analysing the effects of integrating diverse pragmatic and radical measures, thereby contributing to climate policies that have a higher potential to be not only effective, but also feasible.

The general objective of the EU funded Horizon project is to create a toolbox for monitoring and scoping land-use and management related EU policies (specifically agricultural, forestry, land, and climate-related policies) and its mid- to long-term environmental and economic impacts. The specific objective is to boost forward-looking land-use and management simulation models in their capacity to formulate, implement and monitor future policies. This will be achieved by vastly improving bottom-up linkages across various scales (farm/regional/country/global), the spatial resolution, as well as temporal dynamics.