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This paper arose out of our experience in evaluating the impacts of EU Structural Fund programmes in a wide range of European countries and regions. The design, implementation and evaluation stages of these kinds of large-scale public investment programmes are often carried out in a rather ad-hoc way, and can become dominated by practical, day-to-day management and implement concerns. One casualty can be the exclusion of any attempt at a systematic approach to the underlying policy decision problem through the use of a consistent and transparent policy design and evaluation framework. In the absence of such a framework, it is difficult to assess adequately the possibility of absorption problems related to funding transfers, effectiveness and efficiency of the policies, and the likely micro and macro impacts of the investment interventions. 1 In light of the potential problems created by ad-hoc decision making, it is important to make use of simple but clear and comprehensive formal models designed to maximize the systematic use of all relevant information within the overall policy making process. 2

The use of an explicit, systematic and consistent framework in policy making is also supported by research and applied work in the field of economics and management science. Here, scholars emphasize that although the majority of simple, ad-hoc decisions are made intuitively in everyday life in the absence of any deep analysis, intuition alone is not sufficient to generate an optimal solution outcome in complex, large-scale, medium-term decision making set-ups such as the case for most public sector decision problems. 3 Instead, the use of