Policy evaluation on Occupational Safety and Health: methodological approaches and critical issues

The European Agency for Health and Safety at Work (2013) underlines that the development and implementation of OSH interventions, including policies, programs and their effects, are not evaluated by means of rigorous and scientific evidence-based research, denoting a general lack of quality in OSH intervention. In this panorama, the Italian case is particularly interesting. In 2008, a system of economic incentives has been introduced (d.lgs. 81/2008, art. 11), which assigns to various public entities the provision of grants addressed to small, medium and micro enterprises (SMEs) that realize investment projects in the field of health and safety at work. The most important intervention, in terms of both the number of beneficiaries and the provided amounts, has been realized by Inail. Since 2010, Inail has financed OSH projects for about 2 billion euros, which go under the name of "ISI calls". Up to now, the evaluation analyses performed by Inail on the ISI calls mainly concerned implementation processes and performance monitoring, reporting, and accounting. Recently, the need for an ex-post evaluation of the effects emerged, in order to improve the policy effectiveness. Therefore, Inail intends to plan a research aimed at identifying the appropriate models to assess the impact of the incentives and to highlight their strengths and criticalities as an economic support to SMEs. This paper overviewes the main theoretical and methodological aspects in the counterfactual evaluation of OSH policies. This overview is fundamental because the topic is not sufficiently addressed by both national and international literature, while studies on this topic are not so widespread. In particular, we reflect on: the possible evaluation questions that emerge when studying the impacts of OSH policies and their implications; the most appropriate evaluation designs that could answer the evaluation questions; and the consequent methodological issues (e.g., internal and external validity, feasibility of an evaluation based on administrative data, etc.).