Nemesis Programme

[Fito Coulter]

Noahwas born on September 17th, 2001. His father, Hunter Livingston, was the richest man in Fire Lake as well as the owner of the ski chalet. Noah was friends with Ethan Fletcher's crowd growing up, and dated Sarah Harden for two months in ninth grade. He was also a beta patient for Project Nemesis and murdered on his biennial birthdays by Juilliard Bolton. This spurred his generalized anxiety disorder, diagnosed by Dr. Gerald Lowell, that he battled throughout his entire life. Days before the Program initiated, Noah began dating Min Wilder.

When Noah finds out the purpose of the Program, something in him snaps, causing him to shoot Min in the back and declare her his nemesis. He then retreats to the Ski Lodge with a team of like-minded people, unsure of the motive behind the murders they committed but convinced that they are necessary. He sets fire to a cabin full of Ethan's people, burning alive everyone inside and eliminating Piper Lockwood from the game.

Over time, his group grows and shifts, but his goals remain the same: to follow the mandate of the Program and conquer Ethan's team. After a successful mission, he accidentally crosses paths with Min and holds her at gunpoint, walking her to the silo to regroup with Tack Russo. The three reluctantly exchange information and almost seem to be on the verge of a truce before Sarah and Ethan attack the silo. Noah is forced to fight and is killed by Sarah, resetting outside the silo. Noah returns to the Ski Lodge team and is joined soon after by Tack, who has reached the conclusion that Min is gone.

Tack proves to be an erratic member of Noah's team. After several failed battle plans and more than one standoff, Tack leads the group into a slaughter and their home base burns down. Noah and Tack end their alliance and Noah, with nowhere else to go, heads home, only to find Min already there, alive. The two light a signal fire in the backyard and begin gathering the Life-Trading Team.

After they flee his bombed house to the battle at Town Square, he offers to give himself up as the final sacrifice, scared that Min will take it instead. She begs him not to and tells him she loves him. He hands Tack the gun and asks him to shoot twice, but Tack sacrifices himself instead. Noah then scrambles to help Min resurrect all of their classmates instead of just twenty.

As the class splits up and they begin their lives on Earth, Noah's role is the "inter-camp liaison." After the silo explosion, he joins Richie Lopez, Akio Nakamura, and Ethan on a trip to the Outpost to see what has become of the people living there. At the Outpost, they find Tack's map and instructions, and Noah and Ethan go after him. Tack explains the presence of other people, and they make a plan to capture one, a Nemesis 3 girl named Rose Valenti. Rose refuses to speak, but Noah comes up with a plan that has her leading the three of them directly to a door built in a stone wall.

Aboard Chrysalis, Noah reunites with Min and discovers that Juilliard is alive. He is then gassed by Chrysalis personnel in hazmat suits. The series of tests begins, and he is forced to play various puzzle games and brain challenges as well as several competitions against Gray West. After graduating to the training-level group, he begins questioning Sophia's motives.

Tack bursts in on an interview session with Sophia and shoots her, explaining to Noah their true situation and that he and Juilliard have been searching for the missing kids sent to repurposement. They make a plan to break Min out from Sophia's imprisonment. When they all regroup for the final battle against Chrysalis, Noah volunteers to be one of the runners to help manually disable the ship. He realizes that for Min and the others to survive, Sophia needs to be removed from the space station, and throws himself at her. Knowing he is almost out of time, he overloads his gun and blows himself and Sophia into space.

210 sols later, he wakes up on Mars with no memory of anything that happened after the Program, resurrected by Tack using Skippy and a code that was saved to Chrysalis. Tack informs Noah that Min is distraught over his death and that Livingston Colony needs him alive.

This Chapter presents the NEMESIS macro-econometric model. This model has been used for several ex-ante and ex-post evaluations of the macroeconomic impact of EU R&I policies. After a general overview of the model, a thorough description of the representation of innovation in the model is provided. As an example of its workings, an application to the interim evaluation of the Horizon 2020 programme is also provided.

The chapter is divided in two parts. The first provides a description of the NEMESIS model with a strong focus on its innovation mechanisms. The second part provides an example of the implementation of the model, by summarising the results of the recent work carried out with the model in the context of the impact assessment of the Horizon Europe programme (European Commission, 2018).

The NEMESIS model differs from the rest of the models presented in this book, in which behavioral equations are directly derived from optimality condition. Being a macro-econometric model, in NEMESIS the short to medium term dynamics are influenced by several factors that keep the economic agents out of the optimal paths. These include adjustment costs, sticky prices, and adaptive expectations, governed by error correction mechanisms for ensuring convergence to the long term equilibrium. Furthermore, the capital market is not explicitly modeled in NEMESIS, which precludes the attainment of a general equilibrium, even in the long term. The notion of equilibrium in this type of models refers instead to a stable state where some of the markets modelled can permanently be out of equilibrium.

Long-term economic growth properties as in the seminal theoretical formulation of the fully endogenous approach initiated by Aghion and Howitt (1998). Under this formulation, the long-term rate of economic growth is an increasing function of R&D intensity, and can thus be influenced by policy.

In what follows, we first present the general characteristics of the model, and then its innovation and endogenous growth properties. We finish by presenting an application of the model to the ex-ante socio-economic impact assessment of the future EU R&I programme: Horizon Europe.

The NEMESIS model is a detailed sectoral macro-econometric model estimated for every country of the EU.Footnote 1 It distinguishes between 30 sectors operating within five-level nested-CES functions. The model covers both the supply and demand sides of the economy, and incorporates endogenous technical change. The conversion matrices of the model for final consumption, investment goods, intermediate consumption, energy/environment and technological transfers, capture the interdependencies between production sectors (with one representative firm per sector) and between producers and other agents in the economy, namely households, the government and foreign countries. Every country model includes an economic core that can be simulated in interaction with a detailed energy/environment module. Simulation of policy effects can be carried out for an individual country or for all countries simultaneously.

On the supply side, each sector is modeled with a representative firm that makes decisions regarding output and the use of factors, given expectations on demand and input prices. Firms produce output according to five-level nested-CES production functions, employing the following inputs: low-skilled labour, high-skilled labour, capital, energy and intermediate consumption. In addition, firms include innovation in their invesment decisions to improve their productivity and/or their products, implying that technical progress is endogenously determined in the model. Innovation is the result of investments in three types of assets: R&D, ICT and Other Intangibles (including software and training). The specification of the innovation process in the model allows to account for a large range of innovative activities, including ICT, which are considered a general purpose technology (GPT). Furthermore, while R&D investments are central in industrial sectors, the other types of innovation assets capture more appropriately the process of innovation in the service sectors. Finally, interdependencies between sectors and countries are captured by a collection of matrices describing the exchanges of intermediary goods and capital goods as well as the flows of knowledge spillovers.

Firms are monopolistically competitive, so that in the long-term mark-ups are constant, albeit different between sectors. Wages are determined via an augmented Phillips curve in which the growth rate of wages is a function of the unemployment rate, labour productivity and consumption prices. Since the model features two types of labour (low-skilled and high-skilled), there exist two such equations for wage determination.

On the demand side, the representative household determines its aggregate consumption as a function of its disposable income arising from wages, capital income and social transfers. Child and old-age dependency rates are also included to capture changes in consumption patterns caused by changes in the structure of the population. The unemployment rate is used, in the short term, as a proxy for the perceived degree of uncertainty in the economy. Total aggregate household consumption is split into 27 different consumption sub-functions capturing relative prices, substitution elasticities and the specific nature of the products (e.g., durable/non durable).

The are two type of trade flows in NEMESIS: intra-EU and trade with the rest of the world. Exports are driven by both an income effect, which captures demand arising from other regions, and a price effect, which captures relative competitiveness with respect to other EU-countries and the rest of the world. Exports are also influenced by structural competitiveness due to quality-adjusted prices, on which all the demand functions are based. For imports, the drivers are similar: the income effect is captured by internal demand, and the price effect by the ratio between the import price and the price of domestic producers.

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