Economic Evaluation of Public Policies

Faculty

Yoshitsugu Kanemoto

Description

Most important in policy analysis is the evaluation of policy alternatives. This course teaches students how to apply various policy evaluation methods to real world policy making. The goal of the course is for the students to be able to evaluate policy alternatives with solid understanding of the theoretical foundation of cost-benefit and cost-effective analysis and full recognition of their effectiveness and limits.

Topics covered are (1) the theoretical foundation of cost-benefit analysis, (2) the social discount rate, (3) risk and uncertainty, (4) existence value, (5) benefit evaluation by estimating demand curves, (6) revealed preference methods such as hedonic and travel cost methods, (7) CVM, (8) shadow prices from secondary sources, (9) evaluation by social experiments, among others. These topics are combined with discussions of real-world case studies. Students are required to write a case study report.

This coures requires good understanding of elementary economics and statistics but does not pursue sophisticated economic analysis. The required levels are Basic Microeconomics and Statistical Method. Prerequisites are
(1) Microeconomics or Basic Microeconomics
(2) Econometrics or Statistical Method

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