Promoting Good Governance Through Evidence-Based Policy Making

Abstract

　This paper gives an overview of Evidence-Based Policy Making (EBPM) with a focus on the quality and quantity of evidence. Policy making in Japan has overlooked two types of evidence, i.e., evidence on the causal effect and on the effect size. The first type of evidence is about the quality. One can wrongly implement a policy that has a limited and/or undesirable effect if the quality of evidence that the policy relies on is very low. High-quality evidence can be derived using field experiments or pseudo-experimental methods such as the regression-discontinuity design. The second type of evidence is about the quantity. Computing the cost-effectiveness of policies is necessary to implement the most effective policies given the budget constraint. Finally, I argue that EBPM works only if the evidence is made and used in the open and transparent environment.