Measuring Progress Towards Social Goals: Some Possibilities at National and Local Levels

The need for progress in measuring social change is evident. Without measurement it is improbable that desirable goals can be reached. Yet, in contrast to a few exceptionally advanced fields, most areas of social concern and public policy suffer from lack of even the most elementary information, leaving the field wide open for guessing, emotion, low-grade politics, and waste, while the problems remain. Considerable progress is feasible, however. The existing information can be organized and provided regularly, and serious work can be initiated to develop information now missing altogether, improve existing information, and develop workable ways for communicating data. This paper, drawn from the experience of an on-going project, deals with the measurement of social goals. Indicators can be identified which reflect reasonably well critical aspects of some of the most important objectives not only of individuals and families but also of local, state, and federal governments. About 20 such indicators were selected including life-expectancy at birth and the number of persons with chronic disabilities as the indicators reflecting the health goals, the rate of violent crimes as the measure of public safety, the number of persons in poverty and in near-poverty as indicative of concerns with equity, etc. Most of this information had to be pieced together. The existing statistical systems are not geared to provide it. Big gape exist. For many concerns, e.g., quality of the physical environment, where the concepts for measurement can be specified the data do not exist. In still other fields, e.g., "leisure" or discretionary time, even the conceptual work remains to be done. Very useful local information systems describing many important aspects of social change can be put together with the information now in existence without much trouble. More complete reporting systems, and systems aimed at assessment of possibilities for future changes require much additional basic and development work.

Effects of Government R&D on Private R&D Investment and Productivity: A Macroeconomic Analysis

This article examines the effects of different government expenditures for R&D on private R&D spending and on private sector productivity. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that 1.00 of government contract R&D performed in industry induced about .27 of private R&D expenditure. Weak indications are obtained that government-funded R&D done in government and in universities also influenced private R&D positively. Overhead reimbursement of government contractors for R&D, however, apparently reduced private R&D outlays. A positive effect of the stock of government contract R&D on private sector productivity is estimated, but it is smaller and statistically weaker than the effect of private R&D capital.

The impact of procurement-driven technological change on U.S. manufacturing productivity growth

As we enter the 21st Century, technologies originally developed for defense purposes such as computers and satellite communications appear to have become a driving force behind economic growth in the United States. Paradoxically, almost all previous econometric models suggest that the largely defense-oriented federal industrial R&D funding that helped create these technologies had no discernible effect on U.S. industrial productivity growth. This paper addresses this paradox by stressing that defense procurement as well as federal R&D expenditures were targeted to a few narrowly defined manufacturing sub-sectors that produced high tech weaponry. Analysis employing data from the NBER Manufacturing Productivity Database and the BEA' s Input Output tables then demonstrates that defense procurement policies did have significant effects on the productivity performance of disaggregated manufacturing industries because of a process of procurement-driven technological change.Productivity, R&D, Procurement, Manufacturing, United States, Technological Change,