Export Nation 2012: How U.S. Metropolitan Areas Are Driving National Growth
By: Emilia Istrate and Nicholas Marchio
The Great Recession reset the world economic map. Suddenly, with the bulk of the world’s economic growth transferred beyond the borders of a recession-mired West and into emerging markets, American metropolitan areas and the nation as a whole were left to cast about for new sources of growth.
View the interactive map for export data about your metropolitan area »
Such a search for growth is why, in the months after the crash, a chorus of business leaders and economists called for a new emphasis on exports in a “rebalanced” American economy. It is why, too, that President Obama — recognizing the power of exports to help reorient the American economy after the recession — launched the National Export Initiative (NEI) in March 2010, with the goal of doubling exports by the end of 2014.
And it is also why the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings published in summer 2010 the initial edition of Export Nation — a first-of-its-kind analysis of both goods and services exports at the metropolitan level in the United States during the period from 2003 to 2008. That report provided a new “bottom-up” view of the U.S. export enterprise as well as a new view of how individual regions link to other nations.
This second edition of Export Nation updates and builds upon the results of the first analysis to examine changes across the metropolitan export landscape in 2010, the first year of the nation’s economic recovery.
Read the full report (PDF) »