| Resumen: |
HM Treasury’s Green and Magenta Books together provide detailed guidelines, for policy makers and analysts, on how policies and projects should be assessed and reviewed. The two sets of guidance are complementary:
- the Green Book emphasising the economic principles that should be applied to both appraisal and evaluation, and
- the Magenta Book providing in-depth guidance on how evaluation should be designed and undertaken.
The risk of not evaluating, or of poor evaluation, is that policy makers are not aware if policies are ineffective or, worse still, result in overall perverse, adverse or costly outcomes. If there is no good evaluation evidence to demonstrate it, then we cannot be confident that taxpayers’ money is being properly spent, even where policies are in reality highly effective. The knowledge we gain from good evaluation can be used to increase policy effectiveness and is essential in informing the development of new policies to achieve the best results. |
