Despite great reform efforts, U.S. students still remain in the middle of the pack in international test scores. Comparing education systems around the world in a new Foreign Affairs article, assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Jal Mehta writes that many of the nations that rank highest internationally “owe their success to approaches that are in many ways the inverse of the American one.” Read more »

From 1990 to 2006, the UK financed five times as many public-private partnerships to improve transportation infrastructure as the United States did. With low interest rates and high unemployment, the timing is presumably right to invest in improvements to the United States’ decaying transportation infrastructure. Read more »

A new report from the Energy Information Administration offers insight into the potential for the United States to achieve “energy independence” over the next twenty or so years. A great number of things would need to come together, explains CFR’s Michael Levi on his blog “Energy, Security, and Climate,” including improved vehicle efficiency, less driving, more natural gas powered transportation, advancements in biomass fuels, and increased production from shale gas and tight oil wells. Read more »

With the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting the latest non-farm employment rate to be 7.6 percent, lagging employment remains a central challenge for policymakers.

In this post on his blog Macro and Markets, CFR’s Robert Kahn examines long-term unemployment trends and how they stack up to the current recovery through a series of charts. Kahn finds that we are witnessing a dismal exacerbation of the usual recovery in employment, putting the spotlight on improving structural and fiscal policies aimed at helping the unemployed rebuild skills and find jobs.

The Obama administration’s long-term budget projection estimates government debt as a share of GDP will remain stable until 2050, then decline, and in seventy-five years place the U.S. federal government in a net creditor position equal to around 60 percent of GDP. This is a more optimistic projection than produced by the Congressional Budget Office and independent commissions studying deficit reduction. Read more »

On Wednesday, President Obama will send his proposed budget to Capitol Hill. While it includes many ideas floated in the president’s previous budget plans, it proposes a switch to an inflation formula intended to reduce cost-of-living payments to Social Security beneficiaries, known as the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI), which has excited some deficit hawks and worried some Social Security defenders. Read more »