Compare methods

	Benefit Incidence Analysis	Microsimulation
Field	Public Policy	Simulation
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2000	1957
Originator	Public-finance and World Bank tradition; codified by Lionel Demery	Guy Orcutt (concept, 1957); modern tax-transfer frameworks developed through EUROMOD and related projects
Type	Distributional analysis of public expenditure	Policy simulation / computational social science
Seminal source	Demery, L. (2000). Benefit Incidence: A Practitioner's Guide. Washington, DC: World Bank, Poverty and Social Development Group, Africa Region.	O'Donoghue, C. (Ed.) (2014). Handbook of Microsimulation Modelling. Emerald.
Aliases	BIA, Benefit Incidence, Expenditure Incidence Analysis	Mikrosimülasyon, micro-simulation, policy microsimulation
Related	4	5
Summary	Benefit incidence analysis (BIA) assesses how the benefits of public spending on services such as education, health and subsidies are distributed across population groups, typically ranked by income or consumption. It combines data on who uses publicly provided services, drawn from household surveys, with the unit cost or subsidy the government provides per user, to estimate how much of total public spending each group captures. The result reveals whether public expenditure is progressive — favouring the poor — or regressive, and is a standard tool for analysing the distributional fairness of fiscal policy.	Microsimulation is a computational method that simulates policy effects by operating directly on a population of individual micro-units — households, firms, patients — and applying rules to each unit according to its own demographic, economic, and behavioural characteristics. Developed conceptually by Guy Orcutt in 1957, it has become the standard tool for evaluating tax reform, pension systems, and health policy before implementation.