The course focuses on the central role that empirical evidence plays in the economic policy debate. The aim of the course is to explore how to organise the analysis of data and evaluation tools in order to assess the impacts of economic policies with counterfactual techniques. Having defined the basic conceptual and methodological elements, reference will be made to a set of specific economic policies (from local to global scale) in order to help students analyse and gain awareness of: data sources in the relevant socio-economic context, interoperability and requirements for economic policy analysis, relevant evaluation questions, empirical applications to isolate the effects of so-called confounding factors. At the end of the course the student will be able to: set up the evaluation design of a policy instrument, select data, manage the surveillance, monitoring and evaluation phases in the implementation of economic policies, interpret economic results.