Seðlabanki

System Dynamics – A tool for economic analysis

A seminar on this topics will be held in the meeting room Sölvhóll in the Central Bank of Iceland Tuesday January 20 at 3 pm. In this seminar professor Harald Sverdrup and his graduate student Rafn Thorsteinsson, both from the University of Iceland, will introduce system dynamics as a tool for economic analysis and show how it has been applied. System dynamics is a methodology and a mathematical modelling technique, developed by Jay Forrester, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) around 1950, to frame, understand and work with the behaviour of complex systems over time. Through out the years system dynamics has been used by companies like, GM, DuPont, Stat Oil and British Petroleum with success.

Rafn Thorsteinsson will explain the overall methodology behind system dynamics, how it is applied in practice and how group system analysis is used to uncover the underlying causal structure of the system. Harald will talk about using systems dynamics for modelling economic systems on regional and national scales. He will show some examples from gold market, trade, derivatives and commodity markets, how such models can be used for commodities (oil, steel, copper, aluminum) and the interactions with the financial system. He will show some of the work that is being done for the German government at present as a part of developing a new type of model for the German National economy.

The seminar will be in English.