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This paper examines the role of economic appraisal of education and training systems under the light of the current economic and financial crisis and of the relevant "exit policy" strategies. On the basis of the literature on the Post World War II "economic miracles", the paper confirms that a careful evaluation of education and training systems can be a powerful tool to transit to the "post crisis" situation and to set a growth path. However, evaluation of human capital preparation through education and training cannot be disjoined from evaluation of human capital utilization- viz. of labor and retirement policies. The current practice is to follow different methodologies, techniques and procedures for evaluating human capital preparation, on the one hand, and human capital utilization, on the other. The paper outlines two possible strategies to define a unified evaluation methodology with pertinent techniques and procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Correct assessment of critical variables influencing public investment final outcome is often a crucial procedure, especially in cases where the dynamics of such variables cannot be controlled by public agents, because they mainly depend on choices and behaviors of other operators. This is a typical situation occurring in development project assessment, characterized by a high uncertainty degree and by a scarce availability of information in relation to the behaviour of aleatory variables influencing investment final outcome. In such cases, risk analysis by directly using Montecarlo method could be misleading: on the contrary, we think that such an evaluation should be preceded by uncertainty analysis, allowing to generate new useful information for subsequent risk assessment. In this context, the paper presents one possible evaluative pattern, especially suited for development projects assessment, allowing first to understand the leeways of uncertainty between which investment decision must be taken and, then, to estimate investment risk and to generate useful information to help Decision Maker defining the most suitable economic tools to mitigate it. The proposed evaluative pattern is composed by four steps, based on different techniques and sequentially articulated, so that each step generates new useful information for developing the following one. Such a scheme allows both to deepen the information produced by the evaluative process, and to guarantee more decisional transparency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]