19 May 2016; Brussels, Berlaymont. The EU Commission launches an important step to strengthen the instruments to judge and improve EU policies. The successful “Centre for Research on Impact Evaluation” (CRIE) will become the “Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation” (CC-ME).
The initiative is discussed and presented at a workshop on
“The role of microeconomic evaluation in ex-post impact quantification of EU policies”
For the program and the list of high – ranked speakers and participants see the website.
Klaus F. Zimmermann (Bonn Graduate School of Economics, Harvard University and UNU-MERIT) will speak in the session on “The practice of policy impact evaluation outside the European Commission”.
The purpose of this half day event is to bring together policymakers, analysts and researchers from the European Commission, international organizations, think tanks and academia, to discuss the role of quantitative, ex-post evaluation of policy impacts in the European policy process.
The event will also see the launch of the European Commission’s Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation. The Commission’s focus on quantification of EU policy results generates on the one hand demand for transversal, robust, objective and transparent impact evaluation tools; on the other hand it calls for an increased accessibility to existing administrative micro-data sources to foster microeconomic impact evaluations.
By bringing together relevant policy and scientific expertise across the Commission, the Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation will help ensure that both appropriate counterfactual methods and micro-data sources are used in a systematic way across the Commission policy cycle. Quantitative evaluation of EU policies across a variety of socio-economic outcomes could greatly contribute to the Better Regulation agenda, the European Semester and the targeting of the European Structural Investment Funds.
The Competence Centre will serve as a focal point of reference to support policy-making across a wide range of areas of impact evaluation of EU policies, by providing advice on data collection and evaluation design, capacity building on counterfactual methods, microeconometric analysis and counterfactual impact evaluation. It will also provide infrastructure for evaluation knowledge management, in the form of a (Micro)Data Bank and an Evaluations Bank.
