Concerns about the cost of implementing and monitoring agricultural policies are mounting with the development of more decoupled and targeted policies. While these costs are inherent in the policy process, reducing them will bring benefits in terms of better use of public funds, and minimising the overall economic costs of policies. The report suggests ways to do so without compromising the aims of the policies. Ways to reduce costs include sharing experiences across agencies, regions or countries, exploiting already existing administrative networks, integrating government and private information systmes, reducing the number of agencies and using the latest information technologies. An analytical framework is developed to examine the trade-offs in policy choice between the precision of targeting, the degree of decoupling and policy related transaction costs. It shows that the reduction in costs as a result of targeting is a crucial parameter in policy choice. The less widespread (more local) the problem is, the higher the gain from targeting. On the other hand, gains may be low if the problem to be solved is widespread and administrative costs are very high. There is still a lot to be done to better inform policy choice. Efforts should be made to measure implementation costs in a more consistent and systematic way, but also to better evaluate the costs and benefits of policy options.