U.S. Trade Policies Hurting Manufacturing States, Says Industry Group

(Industry Week – Adrienne Selko)

A new study, by the U.S. Business and Industry Council (USBIC), looking at 10-year growth rates for eight industrial states looming large in this year’s national elections – Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, found that the slowest growers by far were industries most heavily exposed to global economic opportunities and challenges – the manufacturing sector.

Manufacturing was also the single slowest-growing sector in the nation as a whole during this period, with current-dollar output rising by a mere 26.25% – barely a third of the overall 66.82% national growth rate, according the study released on September 23.
Moreover, manufacturing’s job-creation performance badly lagged that of the rest of the economy as well, indicating that its slow growth as well as its improving productivity were responsible for its 20.3% job loss during the decade.

By contrast, the fastest-growing sectors in these states’ economies and the U.S. economy from 1997 to 2007 were sectors with little or virtually no exposure to global economic conditions. Industries in the “partly exposed” sector included finance, retail trade, educational services, and information services. Industries in the “virtually unexposed” sector included health care and social assistance, real estate, construction, administrative and waste services and government.

“With America’s most trade-sensitive sectors exposed as growth as well as jobs laggards, it’s clear that current U.S. trade policies are failing the national economy and the economies of politically crucial industrial states,” said Alan Tonelson of USBIC. “The concentration of rapid growth in sectors largely unaffected by the international economy tells us that the nation and the industrial battlegrounds have grown in spite of current U.S. trade policies, not because of them.” Read the complete article.