A major challenge that faces public authorities responsible for local economic and
employment development – and a critical challenge for policymakers wrestling with all
forms of subnational development – is how to assess which programmes and which
policies actually work. A corollary to this challenge is to identify, among the
programmes that do work, those that provide the best value for money. In a
macroeconomic context in which pressure on discretionary public spending is only
likely to increase, not least because of the fiscal implications of the demographic
transition, the need for answers to questions of policy effectiveness and efficiency will
become all the more pressing. For a number of years now, and in a variety of fora, the
OECD’s Local Economic and Employment Development Programme (LEED) has drawn
attention to the deficit in many OECD member countries as regards the volume and
quality of evaluative research on the tools used to enhance local development. As part
of its efforts to address the evaluation shortfall, the LEED Programme organised a
major international conference in Vienna in November 2002 entitled “Evaluating Local
Economic and Employment Development”. This conference received generous financial
and logistical support from the European Commission (DG Employment) and Austria’s
Ministry of Economic Affairs and Labour. The conference brought together many of the
leading academics and practitioners in the OECD area concerned with such issues as:
How do governments use the results of evaluative research? What is best-practice in
evaluating the schemes that are often used to accelerate local economic and
employment development? And can rigorous evaluation methods be used to measure
the impact on entire localities of multi-instrument strategies and programmes?