UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA UNIVERSITÉ PARIS DAUPHINE EVALUATING PUBLIC POLICIES NORMATIVE MODELS BEYOND COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution A. Einstein ii iii EVALUATING PUBLIC POLICIES The subject of the thesis: “Evaluating Public Policies- Normative Models Beyond Cost Benefit Analysis ” arise from the interest in the public policies and their construction, and in particular from the problem of how to evaluate them. The thesis, after a preliminary study of tools and mechanisms for European Public Policy founds distributions, has dealt with the Evidence-Based Policy-Making (EBPM). Thus, studying EBPM’s objectives and concepts, we studied the characteristics that make legitimate policies, but also those features that make public policies “unique ” investment decisions, or better that make such decisions different from all other types of decisions. These feature were then analyzed and summarized in four points: • medium or long-term time horizon; • several different source of uncertainty related with the policy-maker; • great importance of the economic aspect; • great importance of the flexibility. The study of these has pushed the research and our thesis towards the study of the tools and the mechanisms necessary for the public policies creation, management and monitoring. Therefore, from this broad framework the thesis is focused on the study of the normative tools currently available to the policy-maker, that are: • Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA); • Decision Theory (DT)