This special report analyzes the causes of the deterioration in America’s trade performance and examines the importance of U.S. manufacturing in helping the nation improve its position in international trade. The report was requested by Senator John Heinz as part of an assessment of technology, innovation and U.S. trade requested by the Senate Committee on Finance; the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; and the House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs. A final report will be published in 1989.

Changes in how physicians and hospitals are paid have made individual consumers, health insurers, employers, and medical providers more sensitive to the cost implications of their decisions. At the same time, these policy changes have elevated the importance of having consumers be informed about the quality of medical providers. Purchasers of medical care (individual consumers, employers, health insurers) need to know about any differences in quality so that they can weigh quality along with cost in making decisions.

This is OTA’S third report on U.S. foreign aid and African agriculture and the most comprehensive look at a single program. It complements a larger, more general work in press on enhancing agriculture in Africa and its already-published companion report on the Sahel Development Program. The House Foreign Affairs Committee, its Subcommittee on Africa, and the House Select Committee on Hunger requested this study. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Subcommittee on African Affairs, endorsed their request.

This paper summarizes what is known about the effectiveness of AIDS education programs and programs in other health-related areas. Also documented are AIDS education programs currently being funded by selected Federal agencies. What is known and not known about the effectiveness of past education can guide the design of future AIDS education and the research agendas of Federal agencies.

Since the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS), research laboratories around the world have pushed the temperature limits steadily upward, opening the way to commercial applications with potentially revolutionary impacts. The scientific race is becoming a commercial race, one featuring U.S. and Japanese companies, and one that the United States could lose. Indeed, American firms may already be falling behind in commercializing the technology of superconductivity.

This report examines how and why students are drawn toward or deterred from pursuing a career in science or engineering. Schools, families, peers, informal education efforts-such as museums, science centers, special programs, and television— all play a role. The subtitle of this report—Grade School to Grad School—emphasizes that many factors and institutions must be understood as all one system.

This assessment responds to a joint request from the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to analyze the military and commercial opportunities presented by new structural materials technologies, and to outline the Federal policy objectives that are consistent with those opportunities.

This special report presents 10 case studies of recent Superfund decisions at sites which OTA believes, from surveying over 100 recent cleanup decisions, to be representative of a broad range of contamination problems and cleanup technologies.

This report provides an overview of U.S. live stock sector. It discusses the potential of commercial applications and expected economic impacts.

This report discusses the importance of patenting transgenic animal for scientific and technology developments, and for innovation and entrepreneurship. It also discusses metaphysical and teological arguments opposing the patenting of transgenic animals.