Impact assessment

Policy impact assessments, or simply impact assessments (IAs), are formal, evidence-based procedures that assess prospective economic, social, and environmental effects of a public policy proposal. They have been incorporated into policy making in the OECD countries and the European Commission. If the assessment is favourable, and the proposed policy is enacted—after a suitable length of time for the policy to gain traction—it might be followed by an impact evaluation; ideally, assessed impacts before the fact and evaluated impacts after the fact are not wildly divergent. In some cases, impact becomes politicized due to a change in the governing regime between assessment and evaluation, and non-congruence might be amplified for ideological reasons. In other cases, the world is a complex place, and assessment is not a perfect art.

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