Featured Reports

Produce Safety Summit: Implications of Mandatory Safety Standards

Every year in the United States, foodborne illnesses cause sickness, death, and significant economic and social costs that extend beyond the immediate victims. In January 2007, the Government Accountability Office designated federal oversight of food safety as a high-risk area because of the need to reduce risks to public health as well as the economy. In March 2009, President Obama announced the creation of a Food Safety Working Group to address the need to reduce foodborne illness.

A number of actions are being proposed to address these issues, including mandatory safety standards for foods such as fresh produce. However, there are significant inherent challenges in the implementation and enforcement of safety standards, primarily due to multi-stakeholder involvement, increased complexities in the food production and distribution chains, and fragmentation of oversight responsibilities.

Protecting Low-Income Families' Savings

The eligibility rules for certain means-tested programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid often discourage saving for retirement by people who are potentially otherwise eligible for and may need these programs. By excluding 401(k) and IRA savings from these asset tests, we would increase the likelihood that lower-income earners will save for retirement. Those who do the right thing by saving should not be excluded from programs that help so many Americans make it through hard times.

Public Health at Risk

The Human Genome Project unleashed a torrent of information about the human genome and the role of genetic variation in human health. As a result, genetic testing is now among the fastest growing areas of laboratory medicine. Today, genetic tests for about 1000 diseases are clinically available, with hundreds more available in a research setting.

Ready or Not? Protecting the Public's Health from Disease, Disasters, and Bioterrorism, 2006

Ready or Not? 2006 finds that five years after September 11, public health emergency preparedness is still not at an acceptable level. Limited progress continues to be but the big-picture goals of adequate preparedness remain unmet. As a result, Americans continue to face unnecessary and unacceptably high levels of risk.

In 2002, Congress passed the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Act, allocating nearly $1 billion annually to states to bolster public health emergency preparedness. Even after this investment of almost $4 billion, the government health agencies have yet to release state-by-state information to Americans or policymakers about how prepared their communities are to respond to health threats.

Results of a National Survey on Produce Safety

A national survey of likely voters conducted for the Produce Safety Project, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University, finds that the American voting public has significant concerns about produce safety. Voters believe that the federal government and food packagers bear the greatest responsibility for ensuring that produce is safe, and they say that neither group is doing a good job in this regard. Thus it is not surprising that most voters—across the demographic and ideological spectrums—wish to see the produce safety system significantly reformed, supporting new safety requirements even if they increase the cost of produce.

Retirement Security for Women

As the baby boomers approach retirement, hardly a day passes without reference to concerns — in media outlets, policy discussions, and research circles — about whether households are saving enough to finance adequate living standards in retirement. Most of this discussion, however, focuses on the generation as a whole. In this paper, we explore financial prospects and problems for women and policies that could materially improve their financial security in retirement.

Saving Incentives for Low- and Middle-Income Families

This paper analyzes the effects of a large randomized field experiment, carried out with H&R Block, offering matching incentives for IRA contributions at the time of tax preparation. About 15,000 H&R Block clients, in 60 offices in predominantly low- and middle-income neighborhoods in St. Louis, were randomly offered a 20 percent match on IRA contributions, a 50 percent match, or no match (the control group).

State Surveillance of Foodborne Illness

In an effort to determine states’ capacity to track produce-related cases of foodborne illness and gain a better understanding of how states conduct investigations of outbreaks, the Produce Safety Project, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University, commissioned Safe Tables Our Priority (S.T.O.P.) to conduct a survey of state health departments. The survey was sent to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and 39 responded. The survey requested 2007 data on the types of questionnaires administered by state health departments to foodborne-illness victims, the time frame in which they were completed, the types of questions asked, and how states collected and stored the resulting data. These elements are key in the effective identification of the source of a foodborne illness.

Strengthening Families Through Guardianship

More than 500,000 children will close their eyes tonight as wards of the state in foster care. They are waiting for the security, stability and love of permanent families. Foster care was created as a short-term safety net for children in crisis, however, on average children will languish in care for more than two years. More than half the children leaving foster care will return home to their birth parents, and about 18 percent will leave foster care to adoptive families. For some, however, reunification with their parents or adoption is not an option.

Subprime Spillover

In the Center for Responsible Lending's December 2006 study, “Losing Ground,” CRL predicts that millions of American households will lose their homes to foreclosures in the subprime mortgage market.

Tending The Fields

Not surprisingly, most states with large agricultural sectors are intensely interested in the economic promise of agricultural biotechnology. Many are eager to capture the economic development and growth potential of a new technology that could provide added value to low-priced commodity crops

The Book 'Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America' (Spring 2007 Trust Magazine briefing)

A proposes legislative and administrative changes that would make saving for retirement easier for middle- and lower-income households, while at the same time offering practical savings ideas for workers. Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America was published by the Century Foundation Press and written by William G. Gale, J. Mark Iwry and Peter R. Orszag, Brookings Institution scholars who are principals of the Pew-supported Retirement Security Project, a partnership of Brookings and Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.

The Potential Effects of Retirement Security Project Proposals on Private and National Saving

This paper from The Retirement Security Project provides rough, ballpark calculations of how several recent proposals could affect private and national saving. The proposals, aimed at improving retirement security for middle- and low-income households, include automatic 401(k)s, automatic IRAs, an expanded and permanent Saver's Credit, split refund capability, and asset test reforms. With the current net national saving rate at about 2.5 percent of GDP, these proposals have the potential to raise net national saving by almost a quarter.