“In France, carrying out public policy evaluations is not a general obligation, even less a habit”

2023-04-24 09:00:07

DFrom the experiences of beneficiaries to professional movements, via appeals from academics, the conclusions converge: public services, and more broadly public action, appear to be in a state of detriment. Health, justice, transport, housing, energy, are only a sample of the sectors where public policies are no longer, or at least more than partially, up to the challenges and contemporary needs. Yet public spending and debt have never been so high. So is the fabric of public policy so flawed in France? Recent figures concerning the galaxy (expensive and ecocidal) of aid to private companies reveal a major weakness in France of the said public policies: their structural lack of evaluation.

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We had to wait for a study from the Institute for Economic and Social Research (IRES) to find out the extent of public support for the private sector in France, estimated at 30% of the State budget (6.5% of GDP) in 2019. Worse, if tax expenditures (loss of revenue due to exemptions) are added, the cost amounts to 8.5% of GDP in 2019. However, no public policy of any government has consisted of to support the private sector up to 30% of the budget. This “putting at the service of the market” or this « corporate welfare »denounced respectively by economists Anne-Laure Delatte and Maxime Combes, do not constitute public policy.

If the causes are multiple, this state of affairs stems, among other things, from legislative provisions adopted decades ago, most of them without review clauses. Their inflation is such that a census or follow-up in the implementation is impossible. In doing so, this weakness of public governance significantly constrains fiscal policy. And of these 2,000 aids, how many of them were, before their creation, and continue to be, each year, the subject of an evaluation?

Trust feeling

Because, far from the New Zealand or Canadian models, France is not used to assessing the impact and the achievement of the objectives of its laws by means of evaluations. However, their methods have gradually gained in robustness and Anglo-Saxon countries have been carrying out such assessments for decades. Between the complexity and the limits of the exercise, on the one hand, and the absence of a culture of evaluation in the administration and among elected officials, on the other hand, the evaluations of public policies therefore remain exceptional.

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