Jobs Supported by Exports 2014: Product and Industry
July 13, 2016Chris Rasmussen, a Senior International Economist in the Office of Trade and Economic Analysis, is the Team Lead for Quantitative Analysis and the author of several publications on jobs supported by exports.
The International Trade Administration has released a report detailing the jobs supported by exports by specific product and also within individual industries. This report joins earlier work estimating total U.S. jobs supported by exports, jobs supported by state goods exports, and jobs supported by exports by destination.
When thinking about the relationship between exports and jobs the natural tendency is to focus on the workers employed in the industry that produces the final product that is exported. For example, a statistic for U.S. exports of chemical products may conjure up images of workers employed in chemical plants wearing hardhats and other protective gear.
However, products are not produced in isolation from beginning to end in a single industry, with the production of any product generally requiring the use of inputs from other industries. As a result of these interrelationships between industries in the production process, the export of a product will impact employment in multiple industries in addition to the industry that produced the export.
In the chemical products example, the production and export of those products will not only affect employment in the chemical industry but also employment in industries such as petroleum and coal products, transportation and other services whose products are used by the chemical industry.
By the same token, production and employment in the chemical industry will be impacted not only by the export of chemical products but also by the export of agricultural products and products made of plastic and rubber that use products from the chemical industry as inputs in their production.
This report uses data capturing these interrelationships to look at the impact of exports on employment throughout the supply chain. This report finds that as a group, manufacturing industries have the highest share, 26 percent, of their employment supported by exports. The report further finds that although 59 percent of all export-supported jobs are supported by the export of goods, 68 percent of all export-supported jobs are jobs located within service industries. In fact, the report indicates that for every job within manufacturing industries supported by the export of manufactured products there is there is also a job supported in service industries by the export of those manufactured products.
To read the entire report and other jobs-supported by exports materials, visit the OTEA website: http://www.trade.gov/mas/ian/employment.
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