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"Infrastructure (Economics) Government policy United States."
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Measuring and Improving Infrastructure Performance
The nation's physical infrastructure facilitates movement of people and goods; provides safe water; provides energy when and where needed; removes wastes; enables rapid communications; and generally supports our economy and quality of life. Developing a framework for guiding attempts at measuring the performance of infrastructure systems and grappling with the concept of defining good performance are the major themes of this book. Focusing on urban regions, within a context of national policy, the volume provides the basis for further in-depth analysis and application at the local, regional, state, and national levels.
eBook
The road taken : the history and future of America's infrastructure
\"The American Society of Civil Engineers has, in its latest report, given American roads and bridges a grade of D and C+, respectively, and has described roughly sixty-five thousand bridges in the United States as 'structurally deficient.' This crisis--and one need look no further than the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota to see that it is indeed a crisis--shows little sign of abating short of a massive change in attitude amongst politicians and the American public. In [this book], ... historian Henry Petroski explores our core infrastructure from historical and contemporary perspectives and explains how essential their maintenance is to America's economic health\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Sustainable critical infrastructure systems : a framework for meeting 21st century imperatives : report of a workshop
For the people of the United States, the 20th century was one of unprecedented population growth, economic development, and improved quality of life.The critical infrastructure systems-water, wastewater, power, transportation, and telecommunications-built in the 20th century have become so much a part of modern life that they are taken for.
eBook
Internal improvement : national public works and the promise of popular government in the early United States
When the people of British North America threw off their colonial bonds, they sought more than freedom from bad government: most of the founding generation also desired the freedom to create and enjoy good, popular, responsive government. This book traces the central issue on which early Americans pinned their hopes for positive government action - internal improvement.
The nation's early republican governments undertook a wide range of internal improvement projects meant to assure Americans' security, prosperity, and enlightenment - from the building of roads, canals, and bridges to the establishment of universities and libraries. But competitive struggles eventually undermined the interstate and interregional cooperation required, and the public soured on the internal improvement movement. Jacksonian politicians seized this opportunity to promote a more libertarian political philosophy in place of activist, positive republicanism. By the 1850s, the United States had turned toward a laissez-faire system of policy that, ironically, guaranteed more freedom for capitalists and entrepreneurs than ever envisioned in the founders' revolutionary republicanism.
eBook
Fit to Be Tied
The 1960s revolutionized American contraceptive practice. Diaphragms, jellies, and condoms with high failure rates gave way to newer choices of the Pill, IUD, and sterilization.Fit to Be Tiedprovides a history of sterilization and what would prove to become, at once, socially divisive and a popular form of birth control.
During the first half of the twentieth century, sterilization (tubal ligation and vasectomy) was a tool of eugenics. Individuals who endorsed crude notions of biological determinism sought to control the reproductive decisions of women they considered \"unfit\" by nature of race or class, and used surgery to do so. Incorporating first-person narratives, court cases, and official records, Rebecca M. Kluchin examines the evolution of forced sterilization of poor women, especially women of color, in the second half of the century and contrasts it with demands for contraceptive sterilization made by white women and men. She chronicles public acceptance during an era of reproductive and sexual freedom, and the subsequent replacement of the eugenics movement with \"neo-eugenic\" standards that continued to influence American medical practice, family planning, public policy, and popular sentiment.
eBook
Internal improvement
When the people of British North America threw off their colonial bonds, they desired the freedom to create and enjoy good, popular, responsive government. This text traces the central issue on which early Americans pinned their hopes for positive government: internal improvement
Publication
Measuring and Improving Infrastructure Performance
Measuring and Improving Infrastructure Performance -- Copyright -- Contents -- EXECUTIVE SUMMARY -- SOURCE OF THIS STUDY -- THE STUDY'S FOCUS AND LIMITS -- DEFINING INFRASTRUCTURE PERFORMANCE -- ASSESSING PERFORMANCE AND DECISION MAKING -- IMPROVING INFRASTRUCTURE PERFORMANCE -- 1 INTRODUCTION -- SOURCE AND CONDUCT OF THE STUDY -- INFRASTRUCTURE PERFORMANCE AND IMPROVEMENT IN CONTEXT -- THE STUDY'S FOCUS AND SCOPE -- SEEKING REPRESENTATIVE EXPERIENCE -- PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN PRACTICE -- THE REPORT'S STRUCTURE -- NOTES -- 2 INFRASTRUCTURE PERFORMANCE AND ITS MEASUREMENT -- THE BASIC CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE -- PERFORMANCE COMPARED WITH OTHER CONCEPTS: NEED, DEMAND, AND BENEFITS -- THE VARIETY OF STAKEHOLDERS -- DIMENSIONS OF EFFECTIVENESS -- DETERMINING WHETHER PERFORMANCE IS \"GOOD -- BASES FOR JUDGING GOOD PERFORMANCE -- DIVERGING FROM THE NCPWI'S FRAMEWORK -- NOTES -- 3 THE PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT PROCESS -- MOTIVATION -- THE GENERIC PROCESS -- THE RESULTING MEASURES AND THEIR USE -- Planning -- Implementation -- Evaluation -- LEVELS AND PATHWAYS OF PARTICIPATION AND AUTHORITY -- NOTES -- 4 MEASURES OF INFRASTRUCTURE PERFORMANCE -- TAKING STOCK -- DATA AS A CONCERN -- PRINCIPLES FOR SELECTING PERFORMANCE MEASURES -- MEASURES OF EFFECTIVENESS -- MEASURES OF RELIABILITY -- MEASURES OF COST -- BENCHMARKS AND STANDARDS FOR ASSESSMENT -- USING PERFORMANCE MEASURES -- NOTES -- 5 INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENT THROUGH PERFORMANCE-BASED MANAGEMENT -- MULTIPLE OBJECTIVES AND VIEWS -- Considering Multiple Objectives -- Considering Multiple Points of View -- DEALING WITH MULTIPLE JURISDICTIONS AND MODES -- UNCERTAINTY AND RISK IN INFRASTRUCTURE DECISION MAKING -- Analytical Methods -- The Matter of Values -- The Role of Regulatory Agencies -- NOTES -- 6 FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS -- HELPING DECISION MAKERS -- IMPROVING PERFORMANCE.
Publication
MEASURING ECONOMIC POLICY UNCERTAINTY
We develop a new index of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) based on newspaper coverage frequency. Several types of evidence—including human readings of 12,000 newspaper articles—indicate that our index proxies for movements in policy-related economic uncertainty. Our U.S. index spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt ceiling dispute, and other major battles over fiscal policy. Using firm-level data, we find that policy uncertainty is associated with greater stock price volatility and reduced investment and employment in policy-sensitive sectors like defense, health care, finance, and infrastructure construction. At the macro level, innovations in policy uncertainty foreshadow declines in investment, output, and employment in the United States and, in a panel vector autoregressive setting, for 12 major economies. Extending our U.S. index back to 1900, EPU rose dramatically in the 1930s (from late 1931) and has drifted upward since the 1960s.
Journal Article