manufacturing

Nvidia’s Boom is Not a Straightforward American Success Story

In what has been a bleak year for Silicon Valley, the sudden surge in the value of tech company Nvidia  read more »

Nissan Chooses Jackson, Mississippi to Produce Two New EVs

Automotive News reports that Nissan will produce two new electric vehicles in metropolitan Jackson, Mississippi at its suburban Canton assembly plant.  read more »

Metro Columbus Lands Massive Intel Plants

Governor Mike DeWine announced today (January 21, 2022) that Intel will build two semi-conductor plants in suburban Licking County, in the Columbus metropolitan area.  read more »

Jaw-Dropping News: Companies Investing $48.1 Billion in New Factories in Texas

Economic development professionals in Texas will remember this November for a long time as the month saw announcements for three record-breaking, colossal construction projects. It’s fair to call them “Texas-sized.”  read more »

Manufacturing Executives Predict Jobs will Return to the U.S.

A recent poll of 3,000 C-level manufacturing company executives found that 85% see certain manufacturing functions returning to the U.S., citing increasing costs overseas (37%), logistics/delivery demands (20%), quality issues (7%) and other reasons (37%).

From the Cook Associates Survey:  read more »

Interactive Data Visualization: The Connection Between Manufacturing Jobs and Exports

By Hank Robison and Rob Sentz

We recently observed that there are only about 50 manufacturing sectors out of 472 (6-digit NAICS) that actually gained jobs over the past 10 years. This made us wonder because we keep hearing that manufacturing output is actually improving. Politicians and policymakers tend to assume that an uptick in output would naturally result in an uptick in employment. So we investigated.  read more »

China: Two Modernizations (Decentralization and Living Away from the Job)

American and European planners have long sought to improve the "jobs-housing" balance, seeking to place residents and jobs within walking or cycling distance. Of course, planners don't place people anywhere. Not surprisingly, their efforts have largely failed, from the new towns of the London area, where people travel about as far to work as anywhere else, to fabled failures of Stockholm, where high rise housing close to suburban employment centers now houses migrants who tend to have far lower incomes than native Swedes.  read more »

Maps of United States Manufacturing and Finance Industry

For our War of the Regions piece I went through BLS data and calculated location quotients for a few key diverging industries, namely manufacturing and securities, commodities and investments side of the finance industry. These are the kind of numbers that really benefit from geographic visualization.

A LQ tells us not where the most jobs are in any given industry, but how much of a state's employment is clustered in the given industry.  read more »

Geography of the US Auto Manufacturing Industry

Talk of bailing out US automakers has dominated the news recently, and we all know that means Michigan. Michigan is home to roughly a quarter of the country's auto manufacturing jobs, and the industry is in rapid decline there and in Ohio, but the state of automaking employment in the rest of the country may surprise you.  read more »

Manufacturing Growth Nodes

Manufacturing is often viewed as a massive anchor to regional job growth. Here's two lists of metro areas that not only withstood the national job hemorrhaging of 2001-2003, but they are actually growing.

Growth by percent:  read more »