Economic Policy Taxonomy

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for categorizing economic policies in a form of a tree taxonomy. The purpose of this approach is to construct an exhaustive and standardized list of actions that a governing authority has access to and can change to control an economy. This is advantageous from two perspectives: by having an exhaustive list of tools, it becomes easier to construct "complete" models (i.e., models that take in all empirical data and aim to simulate economic dynamics) of an economy and understand what the assumptions of these models are; and by knowing all available actions, economic strategies can be devised that target specific economic performance metrics with an exhaustive list of policies.