If you are one of my student, my pedagogical ressources are online :

http://teaching.parisschoolofeconomics.eu

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Evaluating public policies

Master PPD - semestre 1

Measuring the benefits from public policies and their costs would seem to be something elementary that all policy makers should do for the sake of transparency and accountability. Yet, this most often is a rather complex endeavor. Identifying the precise consequences of a public policy or program on particular aspects of an economy or a society and distinguishing them from phenomena taking place at the same time –i.e. the problem of "attribution" – is a difficult task. Quantifying those consequences as well as the cost of public policies raises other difficulties when one cannot rely on some explicit price system for public goods and services. The demand for this type of evaluation is growing, at the national level (effectiveness of public spending) or at the international level (effectiveness of official development assistance), at the micro-economic level (for instance the impact of some infrastructure project) or at the macro-economic level (effects of a reform of the tax system or of trade policy). This course will review existing evaluation techniques, in particular those techniques that permit evaluating not only the aggregate effects of a policy but also their distributional effects. Using cost-benefit and tax incidence analysis as a theoretical reference, the course will cover evaluation techniques based on some kind of experimentation, structural micro-econometric modeling, micro-simulation and the combination of these techniques with macro-economic modeling in the so-called micro-macro models. In each case, it will rely on applications drawn from the recent literature.

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The distributional challenges of globalization

Masters APE et PPD - semestre 2

Economic analysis suggests the various forms of globalization increase the efficiency of the global economy in agreement with the well-known model of international trade. This is true, however, only under a set of conditions that need to be identified. On the other hand, this aggregate efficiency argument does not say anything about the distributional effects that globalization may have. Even if the total welfare gain is positive, some agents may gain proportionally less than others and some may even lose. The social tensions that globalization may generate must be found in those distributional asymmetries, and to the difficulty to implement mechanisms that would compensate the losers. This course will review the main distributional effects of globalization under its different forms, as they could be observed over the last 15 to 20 years. It will try to establish whether these effects are those predicted by economic theory and whether they can be compensated by redistribution policies. The various channels of globalization covered in the course will include: the flow of goods and services, of capital, of people (migration), official development assistance, technological transfers and intellectual property rights, and finally global externalities, emphasizing global warming. A final chapter will be devoted to the issue of global governance.