Forbes Magazine says manufacturing in the U.S. has enjoyed a renaissance since 2009, gaining back 828,000 jobs since the recession. And the industrial heartland has been leading the charge, in sharp contrast to other areas of the economy.
Forbes has released its ranking of the 48 metropolitan statistical areas with at least 50,000 manufacturing positions, based on employment growth in the sector over the short-, medium- and long-term, going back to 2005, and factoring in momentum (whether growth is slowing or accelerating). Greater Cincinnati is ranked #9.
"Perhaps no sector in the U.S. economy generates more angst than manufacturing," Joel Kotkin writes in the list's introduction. "Over the past quarter century, manufacturing has hemorrhaged over 5 million jobs. The devastation of many regional economies, particularly in the Midwest, is testament to this decline. If the information sector has been the golden child of the media, manufacturing has been the offspring that we pity but can't comfortably embrace."
Yet over the period from 1997 to 2012, he continues, labor productivity growth in manufacturing is 3.3% per year, one-third higher than the rest of the economy. In addition, "a dollar of final demand for manufacturing generates $1.33 in output from other sectors of the economy, considerably higher than the multiplier for information ($0.80) and more than twice as high as such fields as retail trade ($0.66) and business services ($0.61). Other estimates place this impact far higher."
Forbes says manufacturing employment in Greater Cincinnati grew by 3.29 percent in 2015 and 11.92 percent from 2010 to 2015.
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