The health of the U.S. manufacturing sector is of ongoing interest to Congress. Numerous bills aimed at promoting manufacturing are introduced in each Congress, often with the stated goal of creating jobs. Implicit in many of these bills is the assumption that the manufacturing sector is uniquely able to provide well-paid employment for workers who have not pursued education beyond high school. Lines between manufacturing and other economic sectors are increasingly blurred. Many workers in fields such as industrial design and information technology perform work closely related to manufacturing, but are usually counted as employees in other sectors unless their workplace is within a manufacturing facility. Temporary workers in factories typically are employed by third parties and not treated as manufacturing workers in government data. Further, technology, apparel, and footwear firms that design and market manufactured goods but contract out production to separately owned factories are not considered to be manufacturers, even though many of their activities may be identical to those performed within manufacturing firms. These definitional issues have made it more challenging to assess the state of the manufacturing sector. This report addresses the outlook for employment in the manufacturing sector. Its main conclusions are the following: U.S. manufacturing output has risen approximately 22% since the most recent low point in 2009, but almost all of that expansion occurred prior to the end of 2014. Increased manufacturing activity has resulted in modest growth of employment in the manufacturing sector, a trend that seems likely to persist even if manufacturing output continues to expand. Wages for production and nonsupervisory workers in manufacturing, on average, have declined relative to wages of similar workers in other industries. Although workers in some manufacturing industries earn relatively high wages, the assertion that manufacturing as a whole provides better jobs than the rest of the economy is increasingly difficult to support. Manufacturers spend more per work-hour for worker benefits than private employers in other industries, but the difference has diminished in recent years. A declining proportion of manufacturing workers is involved in physical production processes, while larger shares perform managerial and professional tasks. Many routine manufacturing tasks are now performed by contract workers, whose wages are lower than those of manufacturing firms' employees in similar occupations. These changes are reflected in increasing skill requirements at manufacturing firms and diminished opportunities for workers without education beyond high school. The average number of new manufacturing establishments opened each year since the end of the last recession remains much lower than in the period between 1977 and 2009. Unlike in the service sector, few jobs in manufacturing are provided by new establishments. Conversely, plant closings are responsible for only a small share of jobs lost. Change in manufacturing employment overwhelmingly occurs through hiring or job reductions at existing facilities.

This report examines the current status of the manufacturing sector in the U.S., which is a subject of ongoing interest in Congress. After rebounding from the 2007-09 recession, U.S. manufacturing output has grown little since the second half of 2014. Over the same period, employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector has been flat. These trends defy expectations that forces such as higher labor costs in the emerging economies of Asia, heightened concern about the risk of disruptions to long, complex supply chains, and the development of inexpensive domestic supplies of natural gas would increase the relative attractiveness of the United States as a location for factory production.

In the blink of an eye, vast economic forces have created new types of communities and reinvented old ones. In The New Geography, acclaimed forecaster Joel Kotkin decodes the changes, and provides the first clear road map for where Americans will live and work in the decades to come, and why. He examines the new role of cities in America and takes us into the new American neighborhood. The New Geography is a brilliant and indispensable guidebook to a fundamentally new landscape.

Makes correlations between success and geography, explaining how such rising centers of innovation as San Francisco and Austin are likely to offer influential opportunities and shape the national and global economies in positive or detrimental ways.

The question of economic transformation is an immediate and practical one for the English-speaking Caribbean. In the postindependence period, Caribbean governments seemed blissfully unaware that the inability to transform their economies was leading to serious unemployment problems. The statistics are quite stark. Unemployment rates in the Caribbean range from 6% in the more prosperous states to 23% in the less prosperous ones. This use of economic transformation and job creation continues to be a major challenge in the first decade of the twenty-first Century. This is the subject that is treated with impressive urgency in this volume entitled Economic Transformation and Job Creation: The Caribbean Experience.