Technical Support Instrument 2024: the project that created GreenREFORM-EU

Why it was set up

The Commission asks Member States to assess the macro-fiscal effects of climate policy. Real climate plans contain more than a carbon price. They contain subsidies, mandates and rules tied to particular technologies, such as electric vehicles, heat pumps and carbon capture. Models used by national teams often cannot score those policies for emissions and for the economy together.

The Belgian Federal Planning Bureau looked for a model that could. It found the Danish GreenREFORM. Other institutions joined the request.

What it set out to do

• Build a customisable “workhorse” version of the Danish GreenREFORM model.
• Give each beneficiary the means to assess the macroeconomic effects of green policies and investments.
• Build national modelling capacity on a common framework, so that teams do not start from nothing.

The Commission’s title for the work is “The GreenREFORM EU model”. The formal project title is Strengthening capacity to model the macroeconomic effects of ‘green’ policies and investments through the GreenREFORM model.

What it delivered

• The model. A dynamic general equilibrium model with forward-looking agents and a modular design. Its energy technology model is hard-linked to the macroeconomic core. The project papers call that block the abatement model.
• Training. Two multi-day study visits in Copenhagen, technical workshops and methodological training.
• Data support. Remote help for teams building their own national data sets.
• A benchmark data set. Produced by Statistics Denmark. It has 57 industries, 25 energy products and five emission types. It shows how the model runs and what a country data set needs to contain.
• The final paper. One carbon tax, simulated twice: with and without the energy technology model.

Who took part

Five institutions took part:

• Austria: Federal Ministry of Finance
• Belgium: Federal Planning Bureau
• Finland: Ministry of Finance
• Italy: Ministry of Economy and Finance, Department of Finance
• Poland: National Centre for Emissions Management

Four of them worked towards a national version of the model. Poland took part in the capacity-building activities and did not build a national version.

Country progress is described on the country pages as each institution agrees to publish it. This page does not report it.

Results

The final paper is the project’s public result. It is listed under Analyses. It reports one policy: a carbon tax of EUR 100 per tonne of CO₂e, phased in to 2030, with the revenue returned to households. The tax is simulated with and without the energy technology model.

The paper uses the Danish benchmark data set. It is not a forecast for any beneficiary country.

Read more

• The final paper, on dreamgruppen.dk. Published 25 February 2026. The paper is dated 19 February 2026.
• The Commission’s project page
• DREAM’s news item on the end of the project (in Danish)