Agricultural activity is affected by a very wide set of regulations and prescriptions due to agricultural and non agricultural policies. In the literature about agricultural policy, a growing attention has been paid to the issue of policy evaluation. The objective of this paper is to provide a literature review of the Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) applied to the context of policy and regulation evaluation. Such purpose implies to identify firstly the main issues of the policy evaluation process and then to identify the potential contribution of MCA as a decision support tool in a policy making context. In the literature, evaluation has been dealt through the measurement of the performance of a policy, program or regulation by way of effectiveness or efficiency concepts. In spite of the simple nature of these two criteria, the evaluation exercises are strongly affected by several problems, which are mainly due to the weakness in the definition and in the measurement of both policy objectives and policy impacts. Generally two main approaches have been adopted for policy evaluation purposes: a) Cost-Benefit Analysis, based on the monetisation of both costs and benefit, and; b) MCA, based on the measurement of a set of indicators and their aggregation taking into account the importance attached to each of them by the Decision Makers. MCA is a method that enables to provide a more robust evaluation with respect to Cost-Benefit Analysis mainly due to the expression of impact with physical and economic indicators rather than monetisation of the impacts. Such property, in addition to the flexibility of the method, allows to adapt the MCA to several contexts and to assess an evolution covering a very wide range of impacts (environmental, social and economic). Several MCA methods have been applied to agricultural and environmental regulation. Generally these methods differ for the adoption of different aggregation functions (single synthesising versus outranking methods), for the treatment of the uncertainty in the evaluation (eg. fuzzy versus non-fuzzy methods), and for the degree of DM involvement (participative methods, interactive methods, etc.). MCA has been invented as decision support in the choice of alternative projects when decision is effected by trade-offs between criteria and then has been extended to both ex-ante and ex-post policy analysis. However, the applications to policy evaluation still denote a wide room for improvement. In particular, a improved ability to support the decision process can be expected if the MCA is included in a consistent process of monitoring and data gathering, and both MCA and monitoring are developed in such a way as to provide a structured interaction with the DMs within a participative approach. In addition, a cautious integration between MC comparison techniques and policy analysis concepts (e.g. additionality) should be sought in order to avoid misinterpretations.
Recent developments in multi-criteria evaluation of regulations
BARTOLINI, FABIO;
2010-01-01
Abstract
Agricultural activity is affected by a very wide set of regulations and prescriptions due to agricultural and non agricultural policies. In the literature about agricultural policy, a growing attention has been paid to the issue of policy evaluation. The objective of this paper is to provide a literature review of the Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) applied to the context of policy and regulation evaluation. Such purpose implies to identify firstly the main issues of the policy evaluation process and then to identify the potential contribution of MCA as a decision support tool in a policy making context. In the literature, evaluation has been dealt through the measurement of the performance of a policy, program or regulation by way of effectiveness or efficiency concepts. In spite of the simple nature of these two criteria, the evaluation exercises are strongly affected by several problems, which are mainly due to the weakness in the definition and in the measurement of both policy objectives and policy impacts. Generally two main approaches have been adopted for policy evaluation purposes: a) Cost-Benefit Analysis, based on the monetisation of both costs and benefit, and; b) MCA, based on the measurement of a set of indicators and their aggregation taking into account the importance attached to each of them by the Decision Makers. MCA is a method that enables to provide a more robust evaluation with respect to Cost-Benefit Analysis mainly due to the expression of impact with physical and economic indicators rather than monetisation of the impacts. Such property, in addition to the flexibility of the method, allows to adapt the MCA to several contexts and to assess an evolution covering a very wide range of impacts (environmental, social and economic). Several MCA methods have been applied to agricultural and environmental regulation. Generally these methods differ for the adoption of different aggregation functions (single synthesising versus outranking methods), for the treatment of the uncertainty in the evaluation (eg. fuzzy versus non-fuzzy methods), and for the degree of DM involvement (participative methods, interactive methods, etc.). MCA has been invented as decision support in the choice of alternative projects when decision is effected by trade-offs between criteria and then has been extended to both ex-ante and ex-post policy analysis. However, the applications to policy evaluation still denote a wide room for improvement. In particular, a improved ability to support the decision process can be expected if the MCA is included in a consistent process of monitoring and data gathering, and both MCA and monitoring are developed in such a way as to provide a structured interaction with the DMs within a participative approach. In addition, a cautious integration between MC comparison techniques and policy analysis concepts (e.g. additionality) should be sought in order to avoid misinterpretations.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
