Continuing our discussion of the policy-making process, let's now talk about Policy Analysis. Policy analysis is advice for stakeholders or clients relevant to public decisions and informed by social values. How is policy analysis unique and how is it different from public policy, research, or scholarship? First of all, when we talk about policy analysis, it's really something that's done for the public sector, but not often in public view. It's different from researchers and universities or think tanks who do research, but then tried to publish it and reports and in peer-reviewed journals. Policy analysis tries to take a comprehensive view of outcomes, consequences, values, and also politics. It is technical and it should be scientifically objective but it also is fraught with political and ethical challenges, as we will be discussing in great detail as we move forward. There are two main types of policy analysis; prospective and retrospective. Let's talk about prospective first. Prospective policy analysis is also called ex ante, pre hoc, or anticipatory policy analysis. It's predictive and prescriptive and really what we're trying to do in prospective policy analysis is predict future states that would happen resulting from adopting different policy alternatives. It really, prospective policy analysis tries to answer the question, what should we do? Then after doing the analysis, the goal is to recommend actions because they're predicted to bring about a particular result. Let's go through some examples. Most countries, but also international organizations like the United Nations or OECD, have macroeconomic models that are used for monetary and fiscal policy forecasting. These models attempt to forecast what would the future look like if different types of monetary and fiscal policies are implemented, what would be the impact not only on a specific country, but also on the global economy? For example, what would be the impact of an interest rate change on inflation or on the performance of private markets? Or what might be the impact of different tax changes on consumer behavior? Another example is the numerous models that are used to forecast poverty, employment, housing, and other social policy issues in all country but we'll go through some examples in Latin America and the Caribbean. One model that is used is something called the social unrest prediction model. In this model uses different events that happen in societies and also policy changes and these are used to create models that try to predict how much public protest and unrest might result in events, often very negative things like assassination, assassination attempts, riots, etc, things like that. Our second type of policy analysis is descriptive or retrospective policy analysis, sometimes also called ex-post or post hoc. This is not analysis like perspective policy analysis is trying to predict what the future would look like under different policies scenarios. Retrospective analysis is really trying to answer the question, did a policy that was implemented work? What was the impact of what was done? It is an evaluation of past policies. It's a description and very technical ways, but focusing on what was implemented in evaluating what was the impact of that policy, did it achieve its goals? Let's do some examples. In Mexico, there is a large program. It's actually a set of social welfare programs called PROGRESA or the Programa de Educacion, Salud y Alimentacion; so Education, Health and Nutrition. There has been very rigorous evaluations of PROGRESA to see what its impact has been on the different areas of social welfare that it targeted and we are going to be talking more about PROGRESA later in this course. Another example is in South Africa and also many other countries. There have been numerous studies of the impact of an intervention called conditional cash transfers on a range of outcomes in families and households, including outcomes like children's school attendance, health care usage, poverty status, wealth gains, and also employment. These are program and policy evaluations that try to tell us what happened when these policies and programs were implemented. More example, s in Brazil, there's been a number of national but also sub-national evaluations of different COVID-19 policies on children's school attendance and their educational outcomes. Also, another example, the European Union invest a lot of money and resources in developing and implementing evaluations of many different EU policies.
