Beyond EUROLINK: COMPACT and the QUEST Series

This chapter documents the modelling history of DG II from 1983 till today—that is, after the EUROLINK experience (covered in Chap. 3 ). This period is characterised both by unity and a breakthrough: at this moment, the DG II established permanently a Macroeconomic Modelling Unit, which was then headed, for more than two decades, by the same person, André Dramais; moreover, the various models during this period shared the same approach to multi-country modelling, the centralised approach. On the other hand, a significant breakthrough occurred in the mid-1990s. Dramais had brought to the DG II the interest, already spreading within various European countries, for the “disequilibrium approach”. The first DG II models of the 1980s (COMPACT and QUEST) reflected this inspiration. However, after the 1980s, a new generation of modellers brought DG II modelling closer to academic standards prevailing in the US, developing forward-looking dynamic models with microfoundations.