(19 May 2016) – Today the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) launched a ‘Competence Centre on Microeconomic Evaluation’. This centre will be a network bringing together relevant policy and scientific expertise from across the Commission, and external experts from around the world, to perform impact evaluations.
The Competence Centre will enhance ex-post evaluations of EU policies by using existing micro-data, which allow analyse the social impact of EU policies on individuals, and in small geographical areas: something which is not easy to accomplish with qualitative or aggregate analysis alone.
The Competence Centre will serve as a focal point of reference to support policy-making across a wide range of areas of impact evaluation of EU policies, by providing advice on data collection and evaluation design, capacity building on counterfactual methods, micro-econometric analysis and counterfactual impact evaluation.