What We Know, What We Need to Know 1476.
Public spending is a potentially powerful instrument for fighting poverty.
This paper, drawn from a book on public spending and the poor, is concerned with the latter. We must first be clear about how performance is to be judged, says van de Walle. Different assumptions about policy objectives shape disagreements about program assessments and recommendations. Evaluating a policy's impact requires assessing how different things would have been without it, but quantifying a counterfactual is not easy. Other methods focus entirely on the individual's valuation of the policy benefits, allowing for responses to changes in the individual's budget set.