- Funding Programme
- Year
- 2021
Policy evaluation in programming and managing public expenditure
The European Commission aimed to help the Belgian Federal Public Service Strategy and Support and the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance strengthen policy evaluation to improve the efficiency of public spending and policymaking. Policy evaluations can generate substantial evidence to improve the quality of public expenditure. The use of policy evaluation and spending review findings in budget decisions could guide a more efficient and effective allocation of resources, help identify measures that do not meet policy goals or were obsolete when compared to policy priorities, contribute to more informed decisions on budget cuts or support institutional actors in the debate on which new measures should be financed and on sound policy design.
Context
In Belgium and Italy, policy evaluations generate substantial evidence to improve policy design and implementation, as well as the quality of public expenditure. They increased accountability by providing citizens and stakeholders with valuable information on how public funds were used and how policies were implemented.
This TSI project supported strengthening of the policy evaluation culture at the federal level. The current system for evaluation at the federal level in Belgium suffers from several shortcomings, which was identified by a 2018 report of the Court of Audit. Despite some efforts in the previous decades to institutionalise evaluation at the federal level, there was still a need to build capacity at the federal level to coordinate the evaluative practices which currently existed in different ministries. Italy sustained important efforts to institutionalise policy evaluation across government over the past several decades.
Support delivered
The general objective of this project was to support Belgium and Italy in their efforts to strengthen institutional and administrative capacity, to facilitate socially inclusive, green and digital transitions, to effectively address the challenges identified in the country-specific recommendations and to implement Union law. To achieve positive outcomes, the OECD conducted a robust diagnostic and gap analysis of the current institutional set-up for policy evaluation across the federal government in Belgium and in Italy. The OECD formulated high-level policy recommendations on how to improve the coordination and institutionalisation of policy evaluation in the centre of government, whether and how to adopt a legislative framework and common guidelines for federal administrations to conduct policy evaluations, as well as ensuring the quality of evaluations throughout government, and to promote their use in budget and policy-making.
Results achieved
The technical support strengthened the capacity of the authorities to carry out and implement policy evaluations across the Belgian and Italian governments, increasing coordination of policy evaluation practices across the governments, as well as increasing the use of policy evaluation in the budgetary cycle. The expected long-term effect are improved quality of expenditure, and more generally, of policy-making.
More about the project
You can read the documents related to the project here: