Abstract
Evaluation is a critical step in the analysis of social policies which, itself, can influence public thinking (Unrau, 1993; Manski and Garfinkel, 1992). Policy-relevant spatial modelling is an expanding area of research, which has a lot of potential for the evaluation of the socio-economic and spatial effects of major national social policy programmes. However, traditional modelling approaches to social policy analysis usually focus on the impact on the socio-economic structure of the population and they have tended to ignore the geographical dimensions of social policies. In particular, the focus has usually been on the redistributive effects of government policies (such as budget changes and social security benefit policies etc.) between households, but there has generally been a paucity of studies that investigate the spatial impacts of these policies.
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Ballas, D., Clarke, G.P., Turton, I. (2003). A Spatial Microsimulation Model for Social Policy Evaluation. In: Boots, B., Okabe, A., Thomas, R. (eds) Modelling Geographical Systems. The GeoJournal Library, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2296-4_8
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