Over the many years, the Development Economics group at the World Bank has been involved, amongst other things, in macroeconomic forecasting for the global economy. Some of our work gets published in the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects and Global Development Finance publications. A few years ago, the team began experimenting with various technologies to assist the team members in their work. iSimulate @ World Bank is one such experiment that has grown to be a much larger initiative.

So what really is iSimulate @ World Bank? …

iSimulate @ World Bank is a web-based platform to perform collaborative economic simulations. The system has the ability to host various types of global macro models and allows users to organize themselves and work in real-time with shared sets of data and economic models. (Currently the system hosts an experimental World Bank global model with 152 countries – more on this in a later post). The neat part of the system is that users can not only access data, but also run customized user-defined simulations. The system also has a web 2.0 flavor with built-in activity feeds, wiki-like simulation logs, dynamically created blogs for each iSimulate group, and more. For those technically inclined, a simplified block diagram is on the right.

… and why did we develop it?

A year ago, we identified our team’s need to meaningfully connect with economists and other colleagues located inside and outside of the Bank across the world. Thus, to begin with, we felt we needed a simple web-interface for our economic model. And that’s exactly how we started: by creating a simple functional interface for our models and data. However, during this time, we also realized that we were onto something much bigger: we were in fact creating a broader platform which can host different types of simulation models (macroeconomic or otherwise). We saw the potential of the system in a whole new light as it opened up the opportunity to create a “niche community around a system”. And so was born iSimulate @ World Bank, our experiment in “collaborative intelligence”, where we attempt to provide a working environment for users to collectively work on diverse simulation models.

Gauresh Rajadhyaksha is the Project Coordinator for iSimulate @ World Bank