Evidence-Based Policy Mistakes
People’s everyday experiences provide huge amounts of potentially useful information. While a common-sense approach based on individual experience is not the most “scientific,” it should not be dismissed out of hand.
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TURIN – After years of stressing the importance of evidence-based policymaking, economists have clearly had some influence on politicians. What economists now need to do is to impress upon those same politicians that citing any evidence before adopting any policy is not evidence-based policymaking at all.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has thrown around numbers to defend his decision to flood the Turkish economy with state-guaranteed credit. But the truth is that the policy was a politically motivated effort to win public support by engineering short-term growth (at the cost of driving inflation to a nine-year high of 12%).
Likewise, US President Donald Trump cites simplistic trade-deficit figures to justify protectionist policies that win him support among a certain segment of the US population. In reality, the evidence suggests that such policies will hurt the very people Trump claims to be protecting.
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