by:
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 sources of information. While scans cover a broad range of issues, nearly three-quarters of the 320 scans submitted to the Center in 1995 fall into one of three broad subject areas—the economy, society, and politics. Other major subject categories are education, the environment, 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:
| Fiscal responsibility and accountability in government: rising demands on governments at all levels to do more with less. |
| The changing "employer-employee contract": issues such as job insecurity, declining employee benefits, and increasing levels of part-time employment. |
| Information and communication technologies: technological innovations in transportation, education, health care and business |
| Investing in future generations: usually an education-related trend, but one that also considers the effects of child poverty. |
| The global marketplace: the impacts of trade, foreign investment, international migration, and the need for high-quality products. |
Most trends are expected to affect a variety of state agencies. The trend which will have the broadest impact on state government is mounting public pressure for increased fiscal accountability and responsibility in government. Information and communication technologies, the changing employer-employee contract, the global marketplace, and preventive health care are also expected to affect numerous cabinets and state agencies.
The year's top scans, selected by the Center's Board of Directors as having the most significant implications for Kentucky, cover a variety of trends. Several of the most common trends among all scans appear in the top scans of 1995. However, the top scans also reflect trends which are not prominent overall, such as accountability and accessibility in higher education, traditional Kentucky industries, the "graying" of the population, and intergenerational tension.
The scanning project and its annual report along with the Center's inaugural trends report, The Context of Change: Trends, Innovations and Forces Affecting Kentucky's Future, are designed to assist state government agencies in developing long-range strategies. Together, they suggest which issues will most affect each agency and what the consequences of the trends might be.