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Regional Holistic Model (RHOMOLO)

RHOMOLO
© European Commission

RHOMOLO is the European Commission's spatial computable general equilibrium model. It is developed and maintained by the TEDAM team at JRC Seville in collaboration with DG REGIO. It is used for policy impact assessment and provides sectoral, regional and time specific results based on scenario analysis.

It covers all NUTS 2 regions of the EU and disaggregates their economies into ten NACE Rev. 2 sectors. You can access the publicly available RHOMOLO data, and the latest technical description of the model. We have also available the latest journal articles and working papers on RHOMOLO results.

In short, the model agents make optimising decisions, and spatial interactions between regions are captured through trade flows and factor mobility. This makes RHOMOLO well suited for simulating the effects of policies targeting human capital, transport infrastructure, and R&D and innovation.

RHOMOLO web application

The RHOMOLO web application allows users to explore the results of four illustrative shocks obtained with the RHOMOLO V4 model calibrated with the data constructed by García Rodríguez et al. (2023). The aim of this simple web application is to convey the importance of using a spatial model capable of producing results at the NUTS-2 level in the European Union.

The user can generate maps showing the impact on GDP (expressed as a percentage deviation from the initial steady state) in years 1, 2... up to 20, generated by the following four shocks (separately):

  • Permanent increase in public consumption (+100 million EUR in each region)
  • Permanent increase in public investment (+100 million EUR in each region)
  • 1% permanent increase in total factor productivity (in each region)
  • 5% permanent decrease in transport costs (in each region)

RHOMOLO is a general equilibrium model and therefore produces a number of results in addition to the impact of GDP (for example, see Crucitti et al., 2022, reporting results related to cohesion policy 2014-2020). The web application available here is for demonstration purposes only and is therefore limited in scope.

RHOMOLO web application

Contact us

JRC-B7-RHOMOLO@ec.europa.eu

To find out more about the JRC's work on similar topics, explore the related JRC portfolios: