Reindustrialization and Economic Development Strategy

We are in the early phases of an export-led resurgence that will carry us through the year 2000. Where, and in what varieties, will the new industrial development occur? We can take the initial uptick in manufacturing employment from March 1987 to March 1988 as a "test period, " a basis for predicting the 1990s. This one-year record reveals the strategic primacy of the labor supply. New manufacturing jobs have sprung up in labor-surplus areas like Texas and nonmetropolitan America. By contrast, in the labor-shortage states of the Northeast, the challenge is for policies to upgrade a fixed labor supply. Policy contexts will thus differ: a postindustrial Northeast, a reindustrial heartland, and an immigration-powered California.