The Post-Truth Era in Government Evaluation of Major Projects and Policies

Leo Dobes ()

Crawford School Research Papers from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: Australian experience reveals an increasingly post-truth approach to economic evaluation, with governments ignoring or avoiding professional expertise when promoting their favoured projects and policies. Lack of formal guidelines for economic evaluation, such as those promulgated by Congress and successive American presidents, are a partial explanation. A concomitant hollowing-out of public service expertise in economic analysis has also occurred. More importantly, public sector agencies have even lost much of their capability to understand and assess evaluations carried out on their behalf by commercial consultants. An effective antidote to this deskilling would be the production and publication of analyses of major government policy and project proposals, as well as the development of a standardised analytical framework, reinforced with training for public servants.

Keywords: post-truth; cost-benefit analysis; evaluation; iconic; nation-building (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 H43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pke and nep-ppm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/pu ... 2017-02/cswp1704.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:crwfrp:1704

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Crawford School Research Papers from Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Stern ().