- Categoria:
- Sull'analisi degli effetti
- Allegato:
- paper
In this paper we address one of the issues raised by the Call for Papers: “Are European Commission evaluation practices giving birth to a European standardisation?” We are mainly concerned with the approach adopted by the European Commission (EC) for the evaluation of the impact of Structural Funds. The EC evaluation guidelines largely ignore the counterfactual methods that the social science community has produced to deal with issues of causal attribution. Counterfactual analysis has become the standard approach for most research institutions and international organizations over the last two decades, with the notable exception of the EC. We offer two main arguments to support the claim that the EC standard approach cannot deal satisfactorily with the estimation of impacts.