EBPM is a form of policy quality control that rigorously evaluates whether individual policy interventions are effective and then reflects the resulting evidence in policy design and implementation.
To obtain evidence that a policy is effective, one must verify causal relationships.
The term EBPM emerged in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, but in practice, numerous social experiments were already being conducted in the United States since the 1960s under the label of “program evaluation,” which was in many respects similar to EBPM.
In Japan, the government began to promote EBPM around 2016, but the focus shifted away from impact evaluation toward data development and the construction of logic models, leading to a divergence from genuine EBPM.
The EBPM 2.0 framework proposed in this paper consists of a new set of “three arrows”: (1) rigorous evaluation of policy impacts based on causal inference and the use of those results in policymaking (narrow-sense EBPM), (2) improving the effectiveness of policies through theory-based evaluation (quasi-EBPM), and (3) expanding access to administrative data.
