Chair:
Rudiger Ahrend (Head of Economic Analysis, Statistics and Multi-level Governance Section, Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, OECD)
Panelists:
Andrew Paterson (Deputy Director, Business and Local Growth Analysis at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy)
Henrik Barslund Fosse (Scientific Officer, Impact Assessment, Novo Nordisk Foundation and former Senior Advisor at the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science)
Kevin Daly (Head of Skills and Education Policy and Evaluation Unit, Strategic Policy Division, Irish Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation)
Carlo Amati (Evaluation Officer, Unit for Evaluation and European Semester, DG REGIO, European Commission)
Alexander Lembcke (Economist / Policy Analyst, Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities, OECD)

OECD and National Agency Representatives to be Confirmed

The speed and extent of technological advances in modern economies, the societal challenges linked to increasing inequality, and the growing importance of non-rival, knowledge-based production factors, are all phenomena that are likely to make targeted policy responses increasingly central in the political debate over the next years. At the same time, public resources are getting scarcer. This implies that there is a greater expectation of “value for money” in public policy, which requires a solid evidence base to inform policy makers on what works, and on what does not. There is therefore a pressing need for systematic improvement and more widespread application of public policy evaluation, including of policies aiming to support economic development in cities and regions.

This panel combines knowledge from different fields of policy to discuss how counterfactual ex-post evaluation and new opportunities in ex-ante evaluation (e.g. big data and machine learning), can become part of the policy cycle and help improve regional development policies and policy making. The aim is to identify current trends in ex-post and ex-ante policy evaluation and bottlenecks towards an evaluation culture in policy making.