Edinburgh Napier University

  There is general agreement in the field of local economic development that evaluation is important to improve policy decisions and their implementation. A range of documents on evaluating government and European Commission economic development policies have been issued in recent years (see for example: DoE, 1988; DTI, 1991; DE, 1991a, b; NAO, 1992), although rarely are these specifically related to local authorities, an exception being the Urban Programme Guidelines covering evaluation (DoE, 1991). This paper seeks to provide and analyse evidence of evaluation in the case of Local Authority economic development policies.