Abstract

The assessment of the socio-economic impacts of policies and reforms is part of the policy cycle in most advanced countries, and it also attracts the attention of academics and scholars. A thorough comprehension of the effects of public policies is needed in order to improve the design and implementation of the policies themselves, as well as to form better expectations on their likely impact on the society and the economy. The regional dimension deserves to be at the centre stage of policy impact assessment, as even policies with no explicit territorial nature may exert geographically heterogeneous effects. This special issue collects five analyses of a wide range of policies and structural reforms. In all cases, the results suggest that region-specific factors contribute substantially to explain the nature of the socio-economic impacts of European and national policies, as well as of the effects of major events such as economic crises and migration flows.