By Kimberly M. Mayo, Peter Schirmer, Billie M. Sebastian
In 1994, the Kentucky Long-Term Policy Research Center established a statewide scanning program to monitor emerging issues that may have a significant impact on the Commonwealth. The Center has collected and analyzed scans on a broad range of topics, considered their possible impact on various state agencies, and identified those individual scans with the most significant implications for Kentucky. The results of these efforts are presented here.
Scans are articles or information from the print or broadcast media, journals, publications and other information sources. While scans cover a broad range of issues, nearly three-quarters of the 241 scans submitted to the Center fell into three broad subject areas—the economy, society and education. Other major subject categories are the environment, politics, science and demographics. In addition to classifying the scans in broad categories, the Center looked for significant trends which offer more specific information about changes on the horizon. The five trends which are the topics of most scans are:
| The changing employer-employee contract: issues such as job insecurity, declining employee benefits, and increasing levels of part-time employment. |
| An emerging emphasis on preventive health care: public and private efforts to address rising costs and other problems with the health care system. |
| Changing traditional Kentucky industries: the impact of new technologies on tourism or tobacco, or ways in which traditional agriculture is changing. |
| Information and communication technologies: including technological innovations in transportation, education, health care and business. |
| Environmentalism: reflecting a new attitude people toward the interaction of the environment with business, social welfare, and even finances. |
Most trends are expected to affect the missions and the work of state agencies. However, the trend which will have the most significant impact on state government is mounting public concern about—and public sector attention to—the need for greater fiscal accountability and responsibility in government. Changing traditional Kentucky industries, the changing employer-employee contract, environmentalism and information and communication technologies are also expected to affect numerous cabinets and state agencies.
The year's individual scans with the most significant implications for Kentucky, as determined by the Center's Board of Directors, cover a variety of trends. Some of the year's top scans deal with trends that are common themes in virtually all scans, including environmentalism and preventive health care. However, other top scans from 1994 cover trends such as the increasing emphasis of brains over brawn in the workplace, the graying of the population, and rising income inequality, which are less prominent overall.
This scanning project and the Center's recent trends report, The Context of Change: Trends, Innovations and Forces Affecting Kentucky's Future, are designed to assist the agencies of state government in developing long-range strategies. Together, the two suggest which issues will have the most signicant impact on state agencies and what the consequences of the trends might be.