Long before policy analysis emerged as a separate profession with its own graduate schools, economists offered advice about government policies. Positive economics provides the tools for predicting the impacts of prop osed policies; normative economics, especially welfare theory, offers a framework for valuing the impacts of policies in terms of efficiency and simple notions of equity. With the expansion of economic theory into ever wider fields of human behavior, it is no wonder that economists have prominence as teachers and practitioners of policy analysis. Indeed, many economists see...
Long before policy analysis emerged as a separate profession with its own graduate schools, economists offered advice about government policies. Posit...
Policy scientists have long been concerned with understanding the basic tools, or instruments, that governments can use to accomplish their goals. The initial interest in inductively developing comprehensive lists of generic instruments for policy analysis soon gave way to efforts to discover more parsimonious, but still useful, specifications of the elementary components out of which instruments can be assembled. Moving from a generic instrument to a fully specified policy alternative, however, requires the designer to go much beyond the elementary components. Rather than directly specifying...
Policy scientists have long been concerned with understanding the basic tools, or instruments, that governments can use to accomplish their goals. The...
