Wichita, Portland, Houston, New Orleans Show Obama How to Double Exports
Shipping at The Port of Portland in Portland, Oregon
Ty Wright/Bloomberg
Containers are loaded onto trucks from a container ship at the Port of Portland in Portland, Oregon.
Containers are loaded onto trucks from a container ship at the Port of Portland in Portland, Oregon. Photographer: Ty Wright/Bloomberg
President Barack Obama should look at Wichita, Portland, Houston and New Orleans to see how he can succeed in his bid to double U.S. exports over the next five years, a report from the Brookings Institution says.
Each of those metropolitan areas doubled its exports in the five years through 2008. The U.S. economy as a whole hasn’t doubled exports over a five-year period in six decades, researchers say in their report, “Export Nation.”
“We can play globally in a way I don’t think the country understands,” Bruce Katz, a co-author of the study and director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program in Washington, said in an interview. “But it’s not enough to have three or four policy makers in Washington pull a lever somewhere.”
Each of the four cities succeeded in part because of their clustering of individual industries, according to Emilia Istrate, another report author. Houston leveraged its oil refining into an internationally competitive chemicals sector; New Orleans took advantage of rising crude prices to export more of its refined petroleum products; and Portland’s computer and electronics companies boosted their international sales.
Portland’s exports are 17 times larger than its economic size would predict, the study concluded.
Export Mindset
Success also takes a certain mindset among company executives, Katz said.
Wichita’s 90-year-old aircraft industry, which had a hand in more than half the airplanes flying today, sought out new customers in Asia and Latin America as the U.S. market matured, said Bryan Derreberry, president of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce.
“This is a community that makes stuff,” Derreberry said in an interview. “Our companies are extremely savvy and focused on the export aspect of their business.”
Obama said on March 11 that his goal of doubling U.S. exports in the next five years is crucial for economic growth and vowed he would bridge differences between business and labor groups to achieve it. He also reestablished a private-sector export advisory council and pledged to boost government financial support for exporters.
Local officials should play a role too, according to Howard Rosen, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
“The important thing is to get metro areas out of their parochial thinking, and get them to think about how they fit into a national agenda,” Rosen, who reviewed the report before it was published, said in an interview.
Brookings’s Katz said that both local and federal officials need to invest in new technologies, such as clean technology, focus on promoting their exports and build up roads and ports to foster trade.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net.
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