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The purpose of this paper is to explore, in literature and practice, the use of ex post impact evaluations within the public–private partnership (PPP) context and understand the major considerations for developing a PPP ex post impact evaluation method.

This paper applies exploratory research through expert interviews from Chile and Australia to describe: the relevance of this kind of evaluation, and the challenges of designing and conducting a PPP ex post evaluation.

The study confirms the lack of a formal method for evaluating the impact of a PPP project. Experts agree on the relevance of performing ex post evaluations to PPP projects and that in practice there is no formal procedure to follow. Among other challenges, experts discussed four general ex post evaluation aims: transparency and accountability, PPP legitimization, industry learning and government agency learning.

This study confirms the gap in knowledge and contributes to the developments of approaches to perform ex post impact evaluation of PPP projects. It also provides several suggestions that need to be addressed when attempting to evaluate PPPs beyond the financial and contractual parameters.

The topic is not fully addressed in the literature, and this study contributes to the initial discussion and development of this evaluation method, which is considered significant for the development of public infrastructure.

Child impact statements are a tool for assessing the potential impact of policy, provision, legislation etc on children. Although now predominantly based on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the concept preceded this Convention. This article is based on a literature review and a series of face‐to‐face and telephone interviews with relevant Irish civil and public servants and NGOs. It sets out the rationale for child impact statements and the experience of using them in Sweden, the UK, Flanders and Ireland, before highlighting the strengths and weaknesses in existing models. It then presents a number of difficulties with the approach as a means of improving children's well‐being and argues that there is insufficient evidence to support their widespread introduction as a primary means of achieving positive policy outcomes for children.

Regional development was the main goal when Norway applied for the Winter Olympics in the 1980'ies. The intention was to use the Games as a strong impulse to a stagnating region, starting a dynamic development process and creating an international tourism destination in the southeast parts of the country. When the International Olympic Committee chose Lillehammer to be the host of the 1994 Games, expectations became high and several scientists predicted strong growth of tourist not only in the host town, but on regional and national level, too. Later on Parliament decided to strengthen this regional development process even further by locate the new national airport in the interior part of Eastern Norway.

This paper seeks to propose the application of future‐oriented technology analysis (FTA) to law. As law traditionally reacts after events and is resistant to change and transformation, the article argues for equipping legal activities with a set of tools, methods and approaches that enables them to acknowledge and anticipate the various possible futures that will guide society.

The paper describes a series of real world examples and case studies – pilot projects, research consortia and academic programmes – that are already employing FTA methodological approaches to pursue their objectives.

Based on these examples, the article explains the various benefits that the application of specific FTA methodological approaches (such as scenario‐planning, modelling techniques and backcasting) may bring to three specific legal fields: legal research, legislative drafting and law enforcement. The article also examines the prospective perils that systematically applying FTA to law may bring about. While the introduction of FTA tools and techniques to law is deemed extremely important and useful, the paper also draws attention to the problems and challenges that this entails, indicating paths for future research.

Future‐oriented legal studies are rare and, what is worse, the ones that exist lack proper methodology, failing to encompass the use of forecasting methods or foresight tools in the development of their studies. This paper attempts to fill the gap produced by this notorious lack of methodology in the legal analysis of the future, and presents a new methodological approach to law. It proposes the application of future‐oriented analysis (FTA) – as a common umbrella term that encompasses foresight, forecasting and technology assessment methods and tools – to the legal sphere.

Farmer organizations (FOs) can elevate many of the production- and marketing-related challenges by ensuring access to technology, farming information and loan for inputs and mechanization. This study assesses the major factors that affect the participation in FOs by the smallholder rice farmers in Bangladesh and evaluates the impacts of the participation on rice yield and production efficiency.

The present study used primary data collected from 1,000 smallholder rice farmers in northwest Bangladesh, consisting of 250 farmers those participated in an organization. This study utilized a sample selection stochastic production frontier (SPF) method, a combination of the conventional SPF and the Heckman's sample selection model, to control for biases stemming from observed and unobserved attributes.

This study demonstrates that participation in an organization is significantly affected by smallholder rice farmers' education, occupation, family size, household income, land ownership and the location where they reside. At the same time, the participation status affects the productivity of smallholder farmers. Findings indicate that farmers who participated in an organization had higher rice yield (11% more) and were technically more efficient (1.4 percentage points higher) compared to farmers who did not participate.

Since this study was carried out with representative sampled farmers from northwest Bangladesh, the findings may not represent all farmers' perceptions of FOs in the country.

Even though more than 200,000 FOs are currently in operation, knowledge regarding the effectiveness of Bangladesh's FOs is limited. Notably, this study used a relatively new method, sample selection SPF model, to investigate the impact of FOs on the production efficiency of smallholder rice farmers in northwest Bangladesh. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature in elucidating the factors affecting participation in FOs and its impact on rice yield and efficiency. Since FOs have been somewhat ineffective in their role as service providers in Bangladesh, this study’s results will guide policymakers to intervene more successfully regarding the changes needed.

As in other socio‐technical fields, future‐oriented technology analysis (FTA) methods are used in transport planning to provide knowledge for decision‐making. Potential effects of policy interventions should be assessed; risk and uncertainties should be reduced; unintended effects should be avoided. A variety of tools and methods of rather different character are applied, none of these methods are able to systematically reproduce a complete system; they all have their specific limits. It is not always clear, however, which method could be used for which purpose. In this paper, a transparent and problem‐oriented categorisation of FTA‐methods is suggested. It aims at supporting an appropriate usage of FTA‐methods in planning processes.

A literature review carried out in context of the EU funded transport project OPTIC (see www.optic.toi.no) reveals that differentiating between different types of uncertainty is possible. This sets the basis for the problem‐oriented categorisation of FTA methods. Key criteria for the categorisation of methods are their abilities in dealing with different types of missing knowledge.

Two categories are introduced which are called “structurally open methods” and “structurally closed methods”. It is shown that the openness‐closedness dichotomy is highly important for the type of unintended effects that can be detected with a method.

The paper has a novel approach for structuring FTA techniques that goes beyond the traditional quantitative/qualitative approach. It juxtaposes a problem typology and a typology of methods

The recent European Union Directive 95/2014 enforced a radical shift from voluntary to mandatory disclosure of non-financial information. Given radical changes in reporting practices, there is an urgent need to assess the firms’ attitude to disclose non-financial information regarding the new requirement. This paper aims to investigate whether the quantity and quality of non-financial information, voluntarily disclosed in the years before the directive came into force, were linked to the level of compliance.

Selecting a sample of 60 Italian companies from the obliged entities, the authors carried out a manual content analysis on corporate reports and developed some research hypotheses to explore if their sustainability practices can affect non-financial disclosures required by the Italian adoption of the European directive (i.e. Legislative Decree 254/2016).

Evidence showed that prior skills and competencies in non-financial reporting made a significant contribution especially regarding to the presence of business model, but further efforts are expected to improve the quality of non-financial reports.

This study yields an initial assessment of the implementation of the European directive in Italy. It may, therefore, help policymakers to identify ways to improve the harmonization of reporting practices. Preparers can also be supported in choosing different positioning of reporting on non-financial information.

This research provides interesting insights into the ex ante and ex post adoption of the European directive by investigating how Italian companies are reacting to regulatory and institutional requirements. One of the main problems remains the lack of a shared understanding of the term “non-financial”, which can make the communication process difficult and unclear.

This research explores the relevance of the Austrian tradition within the field of public policy studies. Policy studies is a research field about what governments can do. Austrian economics, conversely, mostly highlights the shortfalls of government intervention: as such overlapping seems limited. However, broadly speaking Austrian principles have indirectly influenced two aspects of policy studies: the conceptualization of the policy cycle as an imperfect process driven by actual individuals with limited knowledge and bounded rationality, and the creation of a regulatory framework that forces policy makers to reflect upon unintended consequences, by using evidence and data. This regulatory framework, assessed in this chapter by reading several regulatory guidelines through Austrian lenses, provides a new window of opportunities for Austrian economics to be relevant in the policy process. Austrian economist can be taking part in the regulatory process and also help select regulatory tools and institutional infrastructures that minimize the unintended consequences of government intervention, while contributing to the definition of social problems that enter the policy agenda from an individualistic perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with one of the technical difficulties of private and social cost–benefit analysis, i.e. the choice of the proper cost–benefit aggregation rule (or method) to use, when a private capital investment decision has to be taken or a public project appraisal has to be carried out.

Although the considerable amount of existing literature, the problem of the choice of the right mathematical aggregation rule is still an open one. The majority of authors claim that net present value is a superior method and thus it is the one to be always used. Other authors try to show that various aggregation methods, under specific conditions, arrive at the same recommendation. An exceptional case is the field of education economics where the internal rate of return is widely used.

This paper offers a survey of this controversial topic which focuses on some clear cut formal properties of the various aggregation methods and considers the empirical characteristics of the different fields of application. Its main conclusion is that no “correct” aggregation rule, always applicable in all decision frameworks, can exist.

Its main objective is to supply clear guidelines to orient practitioners and help the teaching on this topic. Its main conclusion is that no “correct” aggregation rule, always applicable in all decision frameworks, can exist. On the contrary, even if one restricts her/himself to a particular class of investments, often no clear-cut selection can be made.

Constraints associated with public agricultural extension services imply that farmers increasingly rely on input providers for agricultural innovations and knowledge. Yet such providers are typically commercial profit-making agents and may have an incentive to suggest relatively costly inputs and/or high rates. The purpose of this paper is to look into the case of Bangladesh and the role of fertilizer traders in terms of farmers’ decisions on which fertilizer to apply and at what rate. Using primary data, the authors examine farmers’ chemical fertilizer use and the associated rice production efficiency, based on different information sources (fertilizer traders, government extension agents or own/peer experience).

Using primary data, the present study estimates an ordered probit model and production functions separately based on whether or not a farmer relied on information from fertilizer traders or own experience and government extension agents, and examines the efficiency score of each type of farmer.

The findings demonstrate that the resource-poor farmers rely more on traders’ suggestions for fertilizer application than public extension – but the actual fertilizer information source has no significant effect on the production efficiency of the rice farmers. This study, therefore, does not find exploitative behavior of fertilizer traders. Thus, this study concludes that small rural traders in Bangladesh are working as agricultural extension agents and provide necessary fertilizer application information to resource-poor farmers.

This is a case study based on Bangladesh – an emerging economy in South Asia. The findings of the study may not be generalized for other countries.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that confirms the role of agricultural input sellers as the extension agent in developing countries.