Restrictions of empirical policy analyses: the example of the evaluation of rural development policies

Anne Margarian

No 95320, 118th Seminar, August 25-27, 2010, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: The present paper asks under what circumstances a standardisation of evaluations would be feasible in order to enable a comprehensible aggregation of results for the European administration. We argue that in the complex environment of rural development the adequate definition of system boundaries is a precondition for the successful application of empirical methods and the identification of causal effects. If macro effects and self-enforcing effects are important, the objects of inquiry have to be defined on a higher observational level. In this case, the statistical identification may not be possible because there might be hardly any comparable (“counterfactual”) observations. We conclude that evaluators need definite theoretical guidance in order to define consistently their field of inquiry. Only then, the goal of comparable and aggregable quantified results might be achievable to a certain degree.

Keywords: Community/Rural/Urban; Development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16
Date: 2010-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/95320/files/Ma ... icy_analyses-192.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:eaa118:95320

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.95320

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 118th Seminar, August 25-27, 2010, Ljubljana, Slovenia from European Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().