The Australian Productivity Commission organised a roundtable discussion on the issue of strengthening evidence-based policy in 2009. Participants included government officials, academics, consultants and representatives of non-government organisations. Keynote addresses were presented by Dr Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, and Professor Jeffrey Smith of the University of Michigan.
The roundtable discussed the principles of the evidence-based policy movement and reviewed how well Australian use of evidence conformed to best practice. It then considered how to improve the availability of quality evidence, and reviewed possible institutional developments to embed good use of evidence more firmly into policy-making.
The roundtable proceedings have now been published. They include papers by the speakers and a summary of the key points covered in the discussion sessions, and a series of background papers prepared by Commission staff and provided to roundtable participants.
I was particularly drawn by a paper entitled ‘Evidence-based policy: summon the randomistas’ by Andrew Leigh of the Research School of Economics at the Australian National University
Tags: evidence-based policy, randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews