Assistance for the organisation of The European Statistical Training Programme (ESTP) – Behavioural Economics Course

Within the framework of Eurostat’s European Statistical Training Programme (ESTP), DevStat in corsotium with the Lithuanian Department of Statistics and the National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria held a three day course on “Behavioural Economics” in Valencia on 2, 3 and 4 of March 2016.

The course was taught by Dr José Vila (course leader) and Mr Carlo Capuano and it was attended by eight participants from several National Statistical Institutes within the European Statistical System (ESS) and from Eurostat.

The objective of the course was to provide the participants with the basic knowledge on behavioural economics (BE); the understanding of the role of behavioural insights in European policy-making and the ESS; and the skills to apply BE good practices to enhance data collection and dissemination in their NSI or other institutions.

The content of the course covered the following topics: from conventional economics to BE; behavioural individual decision-making (decision under uncertainty: propect and rank dependent utility theories; decision along time); behavioural social decision-making (behavioural game theory, strategy versus cooperation); BE for policy-making (the European approach; behavioural markets; and ethical considerations); and applications of BE in an NSI (BE-based good practices to enhance data collection and data dissemination).

The course included also a visit to the experimental lab (LINEEX).

DevStat thanks the trainers and also the participants for their commitment during the course sessions.