12/8/2009 4:00:00 PM By
E.J. Reedy
12/3/2009 9:00:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
I was reminded last week of some work I had done a couple of months back which looked at COBRA health insurance. The reminder came from a posting the
Bureau of Economic Analysis did to clarify its treatment of COBRA payments in the national accounts.
My earlier work was to comment on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Current Population Survey module on
displaced workers. I had earlier posted draft comments but received some great input from a colleague, Margo Quiriconi, on that draft so here are
my final comments submitted to BLS. What amazed me in reviewing this module was that in the midst of a national debate on health insurance and the Great Recession that BLS hadn't taken more care to revise the module. Set to go to the field in January in the exact same form it was fielded two years ago no one seems to be worried about measuring really important aspects of health insurance in the displaced worker population like
COBRA insurance or where people displaced from their job in this Great Recession are receiving their health insurance (if they are). At this point, it is too late to change anything for this module, but it is, in my opinion, a real missed opportunity to collect relevant and meaningful information on an important population. This could be a great module to someday finally answer the question about health care job lock by looking at people who are displaced but had access to health insurance through another source and whether that effects one way or the other their propensity to start a business.
12/2/2009 9:00:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
According to a
new Intel/Newsweek survey, consumers remain confident in the role that innovation will play in driving future economic growth. While this is survey I suspect knew the storyline that it wanted to tell before even going to the field, I did find some aspects of their survey about perceptions of future technological innovation to be interesting. Here are a couple of paragraphs from their press release:
However, even as Americans see technological innovation as a key growth driver, they have significant doubts about their country's ability to hold on to global leadership. Despite many nations giving the United States credit for leadership in technology innovation today, only one-third of Americans saw themselves leading over the next 30 years.
Americans are not alone in their belief that they risk losing the mantle of innovation leadership. A large majority of Europeans gave technology innovation a nod for improved quality of life and positive economic impact. However, Europeans are even less optimistic than Americans about their own ability to be innovative long-term. Only 14 percent saw a European country leading on technology innovation in the future, and the rest ceded future leadership to nations such as China, Japan and India. In contrast, China shows strong confidence in its future strength as 54 percent of Chinese people predicted that their country will pioneer the next society-changing technology and overtake the United States in the next 30 years.
We have asked a similar question before (not that that makes me any more confident in its predictive nature). Think back to the perceptions created of Japan in the 1980s. As such, I'd take this with a grain of salt. Certainly media can influence attitudes significantly when it comes to a countries confidence. But I can also recognize how self-fulfilling defeatists attitudes can become. That is part of why we engaged in Global Entrepreneurship Week to try to positively affect the images and opportunities young people can find in entrepreneurship. Perhaps next years theme should try to take on perceptions of our abilities to innovate technologically?