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The 2026 IMA World Congress is hosted by the Center for Applied Public Economics at the UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles. This page tells you who to look for if you need someone from the local organizing team.
T-shirts: Throughout the conference, members of the local team can be recognized by their back CAPE T-shirts (you will recognize them when you see them ;-)).
Local team
CAPE is lucky and grateful for being able to lean on the work of many motivated and competent collaborators to get the IMA World Congress organized. The following list will tell you who is doing what. (All these people work on the organization of the IMA congress on top or their normal job, so please refrain from needlessly contacting the local team).
- Administrative coordination: Julie Daele (administrative coordinator CAPE).
- Graphic design: Jean-François Huget (Communications Service UCLouvain Saint-Louis - Bruxelles)
- Event organizers: Jean-François Huget and Elisa Delforge (Communications Service UCLouvain Saint-Louis - Bruxelles)
- Financial management: Laura Bertora (Financial Administration UCLouvain Saint-Louis - Bruxelles)
- IT support: Salahedine Hajji (IT service UCLouvain Saint-Louis - Bruxelles)
- Website: Tom Truyts (Director CAPE)
- Local conference lead: Tom Truyts (Director CAPE) & Hélène Latzer (Director CEREC)
The Center for Applied Public Economics (CAPE)
- CAPE was founded in 2019 as a multidisciplinary research center specializing in public policy evaluation, microsimulation and data science. The research activities of CAPE are centered around a single multidisciplinary collective research project, called Beamm (for: Belgian Arithmetic Microsimulation Model).
- The Beamm project aims to develop a large-scale, online, cloud-native, open-access tax-benefit policy evaluation platform.
- Beamm is built on a large collection of microdatasets, both full-population administrative data and survey data.
- Part of CAPE develops custom AI algorithms to statistically merge these datasets, to generate 100% fictitious but highly realistic datasets and to nowcast/forecast these microdata.
- The tax-benefit microsimulation models in detail a broad set of taxes, social contributions, and social benefits, but is also used for other questions such as transport pricing, fiscal federalism etc.
- CAPE is currently working on the integration of behavioral models on 4 fronts: 1) a labor supply model, 2) a consumption model, 3) a transport model and 4) a model of intra-household dynamics.
- The first online platform out of a family of online models is available here, and allows policy makers, civil society and citizens to simulate reforms in fiscal or social policies, and presents a detailed analysis and visualization of the impact of the policy from a multitude of points of view in a matter of seconds.
- CAPE works in a core-periphery model, in which a core team develops and maintains the central model, while other researchers develop more peripheral aspects of the platform for their research, which in turn expands the scope of the core model. CAPE imposes uniform and compatible coding, and relies on advanced versioning and project management techniques to enable Beamm to be an ‘all for one, one for all’ project: all researchers contribute to the common platform and benefit in return from the work of all their colleagues.
- Current research includes: AI for data fusion and synthetic data, inequality analysis, climate policies, valuing public transport, kilometer charges, labor market modeling, economics of education, collective household models, optimal marginal tax reforms, design exercises for participatory democracy etc.
