MEDUSA - Modelling Equity and DistribUtional impacts for Socioeconomic Analysis

Addressing the major challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, will require complex and ambitious policies that promote social justice. To do so, it is necessary to design efficient policies that do not exacerbate existing inequalities, such as gender or income inequality. In this sense, it is essential to carry out impact analyses of policies from a holistic perspective that evaluates the economy, energy, land, and water systems in an integrated manner before implementing them. While Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) have been a fundamental tool in the past, micro-simulation models for distributional analysis have the advantage of providing more heterogeneous results that help to more robustly identify the socio-economic impacts of the policies to be implemented. These analyses make it possible to identify the people who will be most affected by policies and to implement compensatory measures to make the policy fairer. Thus, the combination of both models (IAMs and microsimulation models) can provide valuable results for decision making.  MEDUSA is an R package that allows the development of distributional analyses in isolation or in connection with other models such as GCAM. Its extensive database allows for highly disaggregated results, taking into account numerous socio-economic and demographic characteristics of households, such as income level, place of residence, type of family or the degree of feminisation of the household. At the moment, the prototype works for Spain, but the idea is to extend it to all EU countries in the short term. However, the package could be extended to all countries that are able to provide the raw data of the model.