Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 23

A summative or outcome evaluation might demonstrate the impact of a policy, programme or project but will not by itself show whether those outcomes justified the investment (HM Treasury 2013). Evaluators may ask (based on Dhiri and Brand 1999):

 What was the true cost of an intervention?

 Did the outcome(s) achieved justify the investment of resources?

 Was this the most efficient way of realising the desired outcome(s) or could the same outcome(s) have been achieved at a lower cost through an alternate course of action?

 How should additional resources be spent?

In general, attempts to address these issues fall into one of three forms:

 Cost Analysis is a partial form of economic evaluation that deals only with the costs of an intervention (Drummond et al. 2005).

 Cost Effectiveness Analysis values the costs of implementation and relates these to the total quantity of outcome generated to produce a ‘cost per unit of outcome’ estimate. The consequences of the policy, programme or project are not valued and the results are expressed as a cost-effectiveness ratio such as ‘the cost per additional individual placed in employment’ (HM Treasury 2013).

 Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) goes further than a cost effectiveness analysis and the consequences of the policy, programme or project are valued in monetary terms (Drummond et al. 2005). Results are often expressed as a cost-benefit ratio such as ‘for every dollar spent placing an individual in employment there is a return of two dollars’. Potentially this makes it the broadest form of economic evaluation method, however, as we will discuss later, difficulties in capturing and measuring the wider consequences of an intervention means that, in reality, its scope can be limited.

We look at economic evaluation in more detail in Chapter 6.