Policy analyses 

Abstract: Several recent studies have developed the view, central to the Clinton administration's economic program, that this nation's infrastructure is crumbling and in crisis. They suggest that the public-sector capital stock has declined since the 1970s and that the decline has reduced productivity, with a corresponding decline of the nation's standard of living. According to that view, increased spending on infrastructure is an urgent national priority. The evidence reviewed here indicates that the view presented in those studies is based on a superficial reading of infrastructure trends and on a faulty view of the benefits of public capital formation. While public capital formation slowed in the 1970s, the slowing was concentrated in areas where demand for public capital was reduced by demographic and energy price changes, as well as by other economic influences. The slowing occurred at the state and local levels, not in federal government capital formation. The federal government provides little of the nation's infrastructure, and there has been little change in the per capita stock of federal nonmilitary capital since 1947. More important, the statistical basis of the claim that crumbling infrastructure has reduced the nation's productivity is seriously flawed. When the flaws are corrected, there is no evidence that an increase in public capital raises private productivity. There is a meaningful relationship between the two, but it indicates that higher productivity boosts the demand for infrastructure. Finally, a recent private-sector poll and recent voting behavior show no evidence of an infrastructure crisis. (Executive Summary)

Abstract: This study applies time-series experimentation methods in estimating costs and benefits of measles eradication efforts conducted by the Center for Disease Control beginning in 1966 . Application of an integrated moving average model , explicated by Box and Tiao, in an interrupted time-series design , facilitates estimation of reductions in measles cases attributable to federally sponsored eradication efforts and provides a basis for applying cost-benefit standards to this public policy . P JLublicpolicy choices concerning health care today focus on issues of therapeutic medicine and chronic care only because public health programs have been incredibly successful in eliminating the threats of smallpox, yellow fever, polio, malaria, typhoid fever, typhus, cholera, and other epidemic killers in the United States. Heart disease and cancer, today's major killer diseases, become more salient when nations become affluent and when they have successfully controlled or eradicated threats from epidemic diseases that once scourged the earth. Thus, paradoxically, as the threats of pox, plague, and fever recede, greater demands are made for justification of expenditures for public health programs and preventive medical care. The author is indebted to Norman W. Axnick of the Center for Disease Control of the U.S. Public Health Service, who has assisted in providing data on cost estimates which are cited here. Robert Foutz of the Department of Statistics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, has provided invaluable consultation on the statistical techniques. Neither of these good people is responsible for defects in the work.