Manufacturing matters to the United States because it provides high-wage jobs, commercial innovation (the nation’s largest source), a key to trade deficit reduction, and a disproportionately large contribution to environmental sustainability. The manufacturing industries and firms that make...

Analysis of data on employment, earnings, and the number of business establishments engaged in U.S. manufacturing finds that:In Metropolitan areas, especially large metropolitan areas and central metropolitan counties, contain the great majority of manufacturing jobs and nearly all very...

An analysis of employment and wage data for 114 metropolitan areas that specialized in manufacturing in 1980 and lost manufacturing jobs from 1980 to 2005 finds that:Two-thirds (76) of the 114 metropolitan areas, mostly in the Midwest, performed worse than the nation as a whole in both job...

Improving manufacturing’s performance is a crucial part of the solution to America’s trade, innovation, and income distribution problems and is especially important to the well-being of metropolitan areas throughout the Great Lakes region. Manufacturing’s decline has contributed to the...