The What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth helps to make local growth policy more cost-effective, through better use of evidence and evaluation.
We are a member of the What Works Network and are jointly hosted by the London School of Economics and Centre for Cities. We are funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department for Transport.
Our core aim is to improve the use of evidence in local growth public policy. We support this by encouraging the generation of new evidence through evaluation of policies. We focus on impact evaluation, which looks at the effects on defined outcomes, after a policy has been implemented, comparing to a similar group or area where the policy was not implemented, to see whether it is effective.
Why impact evaluation?
Evaluation can take different forms.
At What Works Growth our primary objective is to improve the cost-effectiveness of local growth policies. Fundamentally, cost effectiveness in public policy is the relationship between inputs into policy (e.g. public spending) and the outcomes achieved from that policy.
The key question we try to understand is whether a policy affects the outcomes it was designed to influence, what the effects were, and how that compares to other policies trying to achieve the same thing.
Impact evaluation helps us answer these questions because it focuses on measuring the effect (impact) of a specific intervention on specific quantifiable outcomes. This is known as ‘causal impact’ or ‘causality’– because (when done well) these evaluations establish that the intervention caused the outcome.