In this course, students get an overview of agricultural policy evaluations and their societal and political relevance. They learn to understand and apply the principles of scientific based evaluations of agricultural policies.
Learning objective
The course has four major learning objectives: 1) Students know the conceptual background of evaluations and can relate concepts in agricultural economics to the evaluation of policies. 2) They know the basics of how to design and implement a policy evaluation study. 3) Students can transfer their methodological knowledge from other agricultural economics courses to the context of agricultural policy evaluations (econometrics, modelling etc.). They make hands-on experiences of methodological challenges. 4) They can critically assess the science-policy interface of policy evaluations.
Content
The course consists of two blocks: First, students will learn the basics of how to design, implement and interpret agricultural policy evaluations. In this block, the conceptual embedding, the design and methodological tools as well as case studies are presented. Secondly, the students make hands-on experience using econometric and modelling tools in the context of agricultural policy evaluations. They apply their theoretical and empirical knowledge to Swiss case studies.
