Evaluating the impacts of government business assistance programmes: approaches to testing additionality

David Bartle and Michele Morris

Research Evaluation, 2010, vol. 19, issue 4, 275-280

Abstract: Evaluation of government policies and programmes should try to test for the additionality of impacts over what would otherwise have occurred. Such testing can enhance the evaluator's objective analysis of outcomes. We report on our experiences in developing and testing a largely quantitative approach to these issues, using econometric techniques to evaluate a business assistance programme. We use a new wide-coverage business database linking firm administrative and survey information. This enables us to compare the changes in performance of assisted firms against matched similar unassisted firms. The econometric estimates find a statistically significant impact of the business assistance programme on the participating firms. In addition, theses econometric results are consistent with qualitative studies that examined contextual issues in more depth. We discuss the advantages and risks for this approach as compared with alternatives, as well as the challenges for developing and resourcing the required capabilities. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/reeval/19.4.275 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:rseval:v:19:y:2010:i:4:p:275-280

Access Statistics for this article

Research Evaluation is currently edited by Julia Melkers, Emanuela Reale and Thed van Leeuwen

More articles in Research Evaluation from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().