OpenFisca transforms legislation into code and allows you to:
- Calculate variables of the tax and benefit system of a country given input variables. Thus, OpenFisca can calculate social benefits and taxes on test cases (a person or a household).
- Simulate the budgetary consequences of a reform and its distributional impact when plugged on a survey. This means OpenFisca can calculate social benefits and taxes on population data (real data or survey data).
OpenFisca is more a platform than an application: its first target is not the end user but economists, software developers, researchers, teachers, administrations, interested citizens, etc.
Few example OpenFisca is used by:
National and local administrations:
- Mes aides designed by the DINSIC. A simulator that allows French citizens to assess their entitlement to social benefits across agencies.
- The National portal of Social Right (Portail National des Droits Sociaux). This portal is the result of a collective work of various administration and actors in the field of social protection and employment. It is technically operated by the Central Fund for Agricultural Social Insurance (MSA). The portal permits citizens to visualize and understand their rights and benefits, find the organizations to which they are attached and conduct administrative procedures online.
- LexImpact an ongoing project with the French National Assembly that aims to allow deputies to be able to simulate the impact of socio-fiscal amendment.
- Lesmevesajudes: a Barcelonans adaptation of Mes aides.
Independent researchers, citizens and NGOs:
- The Institut des Politiques Publiques (IPP) (https://www.ipp.eu/) use OpenFisca to publish articles exploring the impact of reforms, focusing on testing hypotheses rather than on modelling.
- Citizens and NGOs for example to calculate the impact of changing how children are taken into account for social benefits or of creating a universal basic income in France.
Innovative Start-ups in the field of Fintech and consulting:
- Such as the banking app Fastoch€.
OpenFisca engine is independent of the country, it is therefore possible to simulate any country. At this point 10 country start to model their socio-fiscal system thanks to OpenFisca.
OpenFisca is a 100% free software published under the GNU Affero General Public Licence.
The project has many contributors: many people and organizations are involved in the project, reading the legislation and transforming it into source code, developing the Core or web tools, developing external products, etc. It is written in the Python programming language.
Contact: contact@openfisca.fr
