My interest in microsimulation started to develop when I was exposed to the works of Guy Orcutt and his associates on microsimulation of households in the USA, and those of Gunnar Eliasson and his associates on simulatio~ of Swedish firms. Their approaches promised the exciting possibility to represent an by simulating the behaviour of individual microeconomic entire economic system units on a computer. The construction of a large scale microsimulation model seemed to be a worthwhile adventure which could yield much more detailed results than existing models. It was also evident that...