Socioeconomic policy simulation
Simulate policy
before it becomes reality.
An AI-powered socioeconomic digital twin that models how policy decisions could affect the economy, businesses, households and everyday life.
- 39
- policy levers
- 342
- causal relationships
- 64
- household cohorts
- 90
- registered models
What if?
Every scenario below runs the full engine — macro, housing, labour, fiscal, household microsimulation and the wellbeing layer — and takes about a quarter of a second.
What if rates rise 1%?
Mortgage repayments, house prices, unemployment and the households caught in between.
SimulateWhat if Australia adds 500,000 migrants?
Bigger economy, or just a more crowded one? GDP and GDP per capita move in opposite directions.
SimulateWhat if we build 250,000 homes a year?
How long supply takes to reach rents, and how much of it construction capacity eats.
SimulateWhat if income tax falls a point?
About $20bn a year back to households. How much reaches spending, and how much reaches prices.
SimulateNot a crystal ball
PolicySandbox produces scenario estimates from historical relationships, calibrated behavioural assumptions, causal and demographic models, household microsimulation and uncertainty analysis. Every result distinguishes what was modelled, what was assumed, and what is a proxy standing in for something that cannot be measured.
A causal graph, not a black box
342 relationships between 132 variables, each with an elasticity, a lag, a confidence class and a plain-language explanation. Click any number to see exactly what produced it.
Households, not an average Australian
64 synthetic cohorts across age, income and tenure, each with a balance sheet. Mortgage repayments use annuity arithmetic; housing stress is a threshold crossing over a distribution, not a scaled mean.
Second and third order effects
Policy is not linear. The engine propagates through feedback loops — supply responses, the wage–price spiral, the central bank reacting to its own decisions — and shows you which loops are active.
Uncertainty you can read
Every headline figure carries a P10–P90 band from Monte Carlo over the coefficients. Every relationship carries a confidence class. Nothing is presented as more certain than it is.
Separated engines
The calculation engine and the AI explanation engine are separate. A language model never produces, adjusts or rounds a number — it reads the computed result and explains it.
Built to become a digital twin
Australia is the first instance, not the only shape. Data sources, model registry, agent interfaces and country baseline are all abstractions waiting for the next set of inputs.
One decision, many consequences
A cash rate change does not stop at mortgages. It travels — and it travels in more than one direction at once. The engine tracks the counterforces alongside the headline story, because policy has winners and losers rather than just effects.
The headline chain
- Cash rate rises
- Mortgage rates follow
- Repayments rise
- Disposable income falls
- Consumer spending slows
- Business revenue falls
- Hiring weakens
- Unemployment rises
- Household stress rises
The counterforce
- Cash rate rises
- Demand cools
- Inflation falls
- Real purchasing power improves
- Borrowing capacity falls
- House prices ease
- Entry becomes cheaper for buyers
The other side of the ledger
- Cash rate rises
- Deposit rates follow
- Interest income rises
- Retirees and savers gain
- Precautionary saving rises
- Buffers rebuild
Complex policy consequences, legible to economists and to everyone else.
Start from the reference scenario — the cash rate at 3.85% moving to 4.50% over two years — or describe a policy in plain language and let the parser turn it into lever settings for you to confirm.
Demo simulation — not an official forecast. The baseline economy is dimensionally correct and in the right neighbourhood of published Australian aggregates, but it is not an official extract. Every relationship is calibrated rather than estimated by this project. Results are scenario estimates, not predictions.
PolicySandbox.ai provides scenario modelling and research tools. Results are estimates based on models, assumptions and available data, and should not be interpreted as guaranteed forecasts or as financial, legal, medical or government advice.
Get the live version
Everything here runs as a demo simulation on a plausible but unofficial baseline. Live simulations connect real ABS, RBA and Treasury series. Tell us who you are and what you would use it for.