After more than a decade of experience, Venezuela's policy planning establishment has come to demand increasingly high levels of performance from its staffs in response to the increasing complexity of the planning tasks proposed. The need to plan for the effects of changing demographic characteristics and to cope with the widespread consequences for the dynamics of family patterns and social interaction that these changes imply, for example, has forced the development planner to search for new tools of analysis which will allow him to gauge accurately the impact of various policy alternatives.