Evaluating effectiveness of public programs

Abstract

How to evaluate the effectiveness of public programs has been a major concern for policy makers and scholars. This thesis takes three approaches to evaluate public programs which deal with poverty in Korea. First, an overview of antipoverty programs in Korea has been presented. Second, various variables which are hypothesized to have impacts on the effectiveness of the programs are identified. The effectiveness are examined from organizational aspects and the target individuals. Third, survey data are used to test hypotheses advanced about the cause-effect relationship between the impacting variables and the performance variables. The analytical tools by which this study is performed are Path Analysis and Principal Component Analysis. On the basis of the above empirical study, recommendations to improve the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs in organizational aspect and individual aspect in Korea are presented.