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Rich and Poor: Simulating Social Policies to Build a Fairer Society

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Advances in Social Simulation

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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Abstract

Inequality is present in many forms in most of today’s societies at a scale that hinders their economic growth and the lives of the people who are part of it. We present an agent-based model that implements different economic redistribution policies and that can explain the emergence of its macroeconomic outcomes by means of the agents’ interactions, as advocated by ACE. Ultimately, the simulation utilizes the generated data and applies several metrics to assess the inequality rate (e.g., Gini index). We were thus able to build a platform equipped with a series of features that allows the user not only to study the dynamics and the emergence of inequality in an economic system but also to analyze, compare, and measure the effect that different policy settings have in the inequality rate and other macroeconomic variables.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://repast.sourceforge.net/docs/RepastReference.pdf

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by national funds through the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) with reference UID/CEC/50021/2019.

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Correspondence to Pedro A. Santos .

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Costa, D., Soares, J., Santos, P.A. (2020). Rich and Poor: Simulating Social Policies to Build a Fairer Society. In: Verhagen, H., Borit, M., Bravo, G., Wijermans, N. (eds) Advances in Social Simulation. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34127-5_11

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