Fuel subsidies have been an enduring policy in Ecuador’s political and economic history. Given their lack of targeting and high opportunity cost, they have been amply criticized. As of 2017, the Ecuadorian government started a budget consolidation plan that so far has involved seven reforms to subsidies policy in less than seven years. In late 2019, in response to social unrest motivated by a temporal elimination of fuel subsidies, the government pledged to study new targeting mechanisms for this policy to mitigate the impact on the most vulnerable sectors. This work seeks to contribute to that effort by evaluating the macroeconomic effects of these subsidies and serving as a guideline for targeting. A computable general equilibrium model is used to assess counterfactual scenarios. The results suggest that by implementing progressiveness and productive linkage criteria, targeting household final consumption and intermediate consumption is a feasible way to reduce the reforms’ negative effects.

Childhood obesity and overweight rates in New Zealand are considerably higher than that globally with one in three children aged between 2-14 years being overweight or obese(1). Children’s dietary knowledge and food preferences are influenced by various factors including the food environment. Schools are an excellent setting to influence children’s dietary behaviours since they have the potential to reach almost all children during the first two decades of their lives. However, previous analyses indicate many school canteens and food providers do not supply foods that promote healthy eating and nutrition behaviours (2,3). The Ministry of Health (MoH) recently implemented a ‘Food and Drink Guidance for Schools’ which utilises a traffic-light framework dividing foods into three categories: ‘green’, ‘amber’, and ‘red’(4). The aim of this study was to assess primary school canteen food menus against the newly implemented MoH Guidance. A convenience sample of 133 primary school canteen menus were collected in 2020 as part of the baseline evaluation of the Healthy Active Learning initiative across New Zealand. Four researchers (three nutritionists and one dietitian) developed a menu analysis toolkit to undertake the analysis of all menus collected. The toolkit provided a breakdown of commonly packaged foods and meals/menu items available to purchase within schools based on Health Star Ratings, ingredients, and/or standard recipes. Assumptions were created for menu items requiring additional detail to be categorised according to the guidance through consensus by all four researchers. Primary school menus were coded by two researchers, and intercoder reliability was ensured by independent coding and cross-checking of 10% of menus. Descriptive and inferential analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS and P<0.05 denoted significance. Analyses of canteen menus revealed that most menu items belonged to the less healthy amber (41.0%) and red (40%) food categories. Low decile schools had a lower percentage of green food items (8.6%) and a higher percentage of red food items (48.3%) compared to high decile schools (p = 0.028). Similarly, schools in low deprivation areas had a significantly higher percentage of green food items (14.2%) compared to high deprivation areas (8.6%) (p = 0.031). Sandwiches, filled rolls, and wraps were the most commonly available items (86%) followed by baked foods and foods with pastry (71%). Sugar-sweetened beverages were just as prevalent as water on school food menus (54% each). Over half of in-house catered canteen menu items were classified as 'red’ foods (55.3%). This study highlights that most school canteens were not meeting the guidelines for healthy food and drink provision outlined by the MoH. Improving school food availability for children in socioeconomically deprived areas needs to be prioritised to reduce inequities. Findings suggest the need for more robust national policies and mandated school guidance to improve the food environments in New Zealand schools.

National Action Plans (NAPs) are a possible implementation measure for the Global Plastics Treaty, through a NAP-based approach. Their effectiveness in other international agreements is contested, and their current format allows for weak, voluntary measures with limited accountability. By analysing stakeholder and country submissions to the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) secretariat ahead of INC-2 negotiations in Paris, June 2023, conducting a literature review, and interviewing key actors, this study aims to determine the support that governments and stakeholders have for a NAP-based approach in the Treaty, and identify the key enablers needed to ensure that NAP-based approaches, if adopted in the Treaty, are effective. Results indicate that by INC-2, more than 85% of countries supported a NAP-based approach, suggesting a high chance of this approach being selected as the means of implementation of the Treaty. However, interviewees and literature reviews indicate that NAPs in their current form are not likely to be effective at delivering ambitious Treaty targets. Six key enablers to improve the effectiveness of plastics NAPs are identified. These enablers should be integrated into any plastics NAPs both independently, and as potential requirements of the Treaty to ensure that NAP-based approaches are effective and have the impact intended.

Firearm violence has soared in American cities, but most states statutorily preempt municipal firearm regulation. This article describes a unique collaboration in Philadelphia among elected officials, public health researchers, and attorneys that has led to litigation based on original quantitative analyses and grounded in innovative constitutional theories and statutory interpretation.

Grand challenges are shaping twenty-first-century politics. Threats connected to health, climate, demographics and welfare are increasingly intruding on the lives of citizens. Still, governments are often found off-guard, and policymakers need strategies grounded in longer-term perspectives. Strategic foresight (SF) helps us to design and shape policies to prepare to withstand shocks, anticipating and adapting to changes. However, as governments work towards embedding SF into their policymaking processes, the empirical evidence suggests that applications are still piecemeal and predominantly limited to the agenda-settings and policy formulation stages. In this article, we argue that to drive anticipatory governance, foresight needs to be applied at all stages of the policy cycle, including in evaluating policies to draw lessons for future interventions. We maintain that considering SF systemically throughout the policymaking cycle, from agenda setting to evaluation, strengthens anticipatory governance.

Normative welfare economics commonly assumes that individuals’ preferences can be reliably inferred from their choices and relies on preference satisfaction as the normative standard for welfare. In recent years, several authors have criticized welfare economists’ reliance on preference satisfaction as the normative standard for welfare and have advocated grounding normative welfare economics on opportunities rather than preferences. In this paper, I argue that although preference-based approaches to normative welfare economics face significant conceptual and practical challenges, opportunity-based approaches fail to provide a more reliable and informative foundation for normative welfare economics than preference-based approaches. I then identify and rebut various influential calls to ground normative welfare economics on opportunities rather than preferences to support my qualified defence of preference-based approaches.

Political elites increasingly express interest in evidence-based policymaking, but transparent research collaborations necessary to generate relevant evidence pose political risks, including the discovery of sub-par performance and misconduct. If aversion to collaboration is non-random, collaborations may produce evidence that fails to generalize. We assess selection into research collaborations in the critical policy arena of policing by sending requests to discuss research partnerships to roughly 3,000 law enforcement agencies in 48 states. A host of agency and jurisdiction attributes fail to predict affirmative responses to generic requests, alleviating concerns over generalizability. However, across two experiments, mentions of agency performance in our correspondence depressed affirmative responses – even among top-performing agencies – by roughly eight percentage points. Many agencies that initially indicate interest in transparent, evidence-based policymaking recoil once performance evaluations are made salient. We discuss several possible mechanisms for these dynamics, which can inhibit valuable policy experimentation in many communities.

Labour markets for personal and household services (PHS) are rife with informal employment. Some policies aim to combat informality in PHS with subsidized service vouchers, but their effects are poorly documented. This contribution evaluates the Belgian service vouchers (1) documenting their formalization effectiveness, and (2) accounting for the persistence of informal employment. To this end, we exploit several types of data and methods.

A first analysis, based on Eurobarometer data, brings in evidence that informal PHS purchased were approximately halved under the policy introduced in 2001. Second, a discrete choice experiment shows that households prefer formal employment, including those that currently employ informally. Third, a survey in the Brussels metropolitan area shows that the persistence of informal employment lies in the relationship of informal employers with their domestic, from whom they are not willing to part. They nevertheless intend to switch to formal employment in the case of turnover. One thus expects partially delayed effects of formalization policies in general, and of the service voucher system in particular. Overall, these results are in line with Portes’ claim that informality is facilitated by strong social relationships, and by differences in price and transaction costs.

This article proposes a framework for evaluating the development and evolution of economic instruments for environmental conservation through the examination of their design and the interactional and structural aspects of their implementation. The framework is applied to comparatively describe the historical evolution of the world's longest-running ecological fiscal transfer (EFT) scheme in two Brazilian sites. Results show that while legislative aspects of programme design, such as linkages and flexibility, are crucial for performance, interactional and structural characteristics during implementation, such as capacity, knowledge-sharing and transparency, can be determining factors in how the programme functions at the municipal level. Policy recommendations are provided for the development of this type of programme elsewhere. Results contribute towards the conceptual understanding of EFTs, an under-utilised mechanism with great potential for a role in conservation policy mixes.

In this paper, we develop a framework to analyze the relationship between evidence and policy. Postulating a normative criterion based on cost–benefit analysis and the value of a piece of information, as well as a topology of the policy space defined by three characteristics (epistemic uncertainty, interests, and the degree of value conflicts), we identify the (Nash) equilibria of an interaction between experts and citizens in providing information to a decision maker. In this setup, we study three institutional arrangements (evidence-based policy, deliberative governance, and negotiated conflict) that differ in terms of reliance on experts and citizens for providing information. We show that different degrees of uncertainty, interests, and value-relevance surrounding the issue at stake result in vastly different arrangement performances; hence, to foster efficiency, rules should be contingent.