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PPI Tech Job Index 2017: States

Posted on January 3, 2018September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tech and tech-enabled jobs are becoming increasingly important to many state economies–not just the tech hubs like California and Texas. Particularly important is the role of ecommerce, which is driving the creation of hundreds of thousands of tech-enabled electronic shopping and fulfillment center jobs around the country (for example, see here). Going forward, we expect tech-enabled manufacturing to help revive job growth in areas that were hit hit hard by the decline in factory jobs (for example, see here).

For this study, we define the PPI Tech Job Index for a state or local area as the increase in tech and tech-enabled jobs from 2010 to 2016, as a percentage of the total number of private sector jobs in that state or local area in 2010. Thus, the PPI Tech Job Index serves as a measure of the importance of tech growth to the economy of that state.

The industries that we include, and their NAICS codes, are listed below in Table 1. These include computer and electronics manufacturing, electronic shopping, software publishing, internet publishing and search, computer systems and programming, management and technical consulting, and the increase in warehousing jobs since 2007. As we have shown in earlier work, this last category picks up the growth of employment in ecommerce fulfillment centers, which do not yet have their own industry.

Table 1:	Tech and tech-enabled industries
334	Computer and electronics manufacturing
4541	Electronic shopping
5112	Software publishing
51913	Internet publishing and search
5415	Computer systems design and programming
5416	Management and technical consulting
493	Warehousing (change since 2007, reflects ecommerce fulfillment)

Table 2 below shows the top states, ranked by the PPI Tech Job Index. We can see Washington at the top, propelled by Amazon’s growth. And California, not surprisingly, is in the top 5. But the top 10 also includes states such as Utah, Tennessee, and Georgia, with North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana not far behind. Utah’s high ranking is due to growth in computer systems design and programming, and electronic shopping jobs, while Tennessee showed strong gains in ecommerce, computer systems design and programming, and management and technical consulting. Missouri’s ranking came from gains in computer systems design and programming, while Indiana benefited from growth in ecommerce and computer systems design and programming. Massachusetts’ ranking is dragged down a bit because of the continuing decline of tech hardware jobs.

The conclusion: The economic impact of tech and tech-enabled jobs reaches across the entire country. We will shortly be publishing a more detailed study where we look at the PPI Tech Job Index for individual counties.

Table 2	PPI Tech Job Index: Top States
		PPI Tech Job Index*	Tech jobs created, 2010-2016 (thousands)
1	Washington	3.4%	77.2
2	Utah	2.8%	26.2
3	California	2.1%	256.9
4	Tennessee	2.0%	42.2
5	South Carolina	1.9%	26.5
6	Texas	1.8%	146.7
7	Delaware	1.7%	5.7
8	Colorado	1.6%	29.0
9	Georgia	1.6%	49.0
10	North Carolina	1.6%	48.9
11	Missouri	1.5%	31.9
12	Massachusetts	1.5%	40.7
13	Indiana	1.5%	34.2
14	Oregon	1.4%	18.8
15	Minnesota	1.3%	28.3
16	Illinois	1.3%	58.9
17	Florida	1.2%	74.3
18	New York	1.2%	84.7
19	New Jersey	1.2%	38.3
20	Kentucky	1.2%	16.8
21	Virginia	1.2%	33.3
22	Pennsylvania	1.1%	53.5
23	Maryland	1.1%	21.1
24	Oklahoma	1.0%	11.8
25	Nevada	1.0%	9.7

*Change in tech and tech-related jobs from 2010 to 2016, as a percentage of total private sector jobs in 2010.

Data: BLS QCEW, PPI

Happy Holidays from PPI

Posted on December 19, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been a surreal political year, but PPI has much to celebrate this holiday season. Throughout 2017, we expanded our productive capacity and the scope of our political and media outreach significantly. For example, PPI organized 150 meetings with prominent elected officials; visited 10 state capitals and 10 foreign capitals, published an influential book and more than 40 original research papers, and hosted nearly 30 private salon dinners on a variety of topical issues.

Best of all, we saw PPI’s research, analysis, and innovative ideas breaking through the political static and changing the way people think about some critical issues, including how to revive U.S. economic dynamism, spread innovation and jobs to people and places left behind by economic growth, and modernize the ways we prepare young people for work and citizenship.

Let me give you some highlights:

This fall, David Osborne’s new book, Reinventing America’s Schools, was published on the 25th anniversary of the nation’s first charter school in Minnesota. David, who heads PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, documents the emergence of a new “21^st Century” model for organizing and modernizing our public school system around the principles of school autonomy, accountability, choice, and diversity. David is just winding up a remarkable 20-city book tour that drew wide attention from education, political, and civic leaders, as well as the media. Because David is a great storyteller, as well as analyst, it’s a highly readable book that offers a cogent picture of a K-12 school system geared to the demands of the knowledge economy. It makes a great holiday gift!

Dr. Michael Mandel’s pioneering research on e-commerce and job creation also upended conventional wisdom and caught the attention of top economic commentators. Dr. Mandel, PPI’s chief economic strategist, found that online commerce has actually created more jobs in retail than it destroys, and that these new jobs (many in fulfillment centers in outlying areas) pay considerably better than traditional ones. His research buttresses the main premise of PPI’s progressive pro-growth agenda: that spreading digital innovation to the physical economy will create new jobs and businesses, raise labor productivity, and reduce inequality.

PPI challenged the dubious panacea of “free college” and proposed a progressive alternative – a robust system of post-secondary learning and credentials for the roughly 70 percent of young Americans who don’t get college degrees. PPI Senior Fellow Harry Holzer developed a creative menu of ways to create more “hybrid learning” opportunities combining work-based and classroom instruction. And PPI Senior Fellow Anne Kim highlighted the inequity of current government policies that subsidize college-bound youth (e.g., Pell Grants), but provide no help for people earning credentials certifying skills that employers value.

Building on last year’s opening of a PPI office in Brussels, we expanded our overseas work considerably in 2017. In January, I endeavored to explain the outcome of the U.S. election to shell-shocked audiences in London, Brussels, and Berlin. In April, we led our annual Congressional senior staff delegation to Paris, Brussels, and Berlin to engage European policymakers on the French presidential election and other U.S-E.U. issues, including international taxation, competition policy, and trade. PPI also took its message of data-driven innovation and growth to Australia, Brazil, Japan and a number of other countries.

Other 2017 highlights included a strategy retreat in February with two dozen top elected leaders to explore ideas for a new, radically pragmatic agenda for progressives; a Washington conference with our longtime friend Janet Napolitano (now President of the University of California system) on how to update and preserve NAFTA; public forums in Washington on pricing carbon, infrastructure, tax reform, and other pressing issues; creative policy reports on varied subjects; and a robust output of articles, op-eds, blogs, and social media activity.

I’m also happy to report many terrific additions to PPI in 2017. Rob Keast joined to manage our external relations and new policy development; Paul Bledsoe assumed a new role as Strategic Adviser as well as guiding our work on energy and climate policy; and Emily Langhorne joined as Education Policy Analyst. We will also be adding a fiscal project next year.

All this leaves us poised for a high-impact year in 2018. In this midterm-election year, our top priority will be crafting and building support for a new progressive platform — a radically pragmatic alternative to the political tribalism throttling America’s progress. That starts with new and better ideas for solving peoples’ problems that look forward, not backward, and that speak to their hopes and aspirations, not their anger and mistrust.

It’s a tall order, and we cannot succeed without your help and support. Thanks for all you have done over past years, and we look forward to working with you in 2018.

Happy holidays and New Year!

How to Modernize and Strengthen NAFTA

Posted on November 17, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

If there is one thing that negotiators from the United States, Mexico and Canada agree on, it is that NAFTA should be updated and improved to the mutual benefit of the three partners. The question is how to do so. To grapple with that question, the University of California and Tecnológico de Monterrey, the largest not-for-profit private university in Mexico, in partnership with the Progressive Policy Institute and COMEXI (the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations), convened a gathering of high-level North American government and business leaders, diplomats and trade scholars at the university’s Washington, D.C. conference center on September 21, 2017. Negotiators from the U.S., Mexico and Canada convened in Washington on October 11th to resume talks on modernizing and strengthening the 1994 North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The impetus for these talks comes from

President Trump, who has fiercely criticized NAFTA and is demanding changes aimed at reducing U.S. trade deficits and “bringing back” U.S. manufacturing jobs. The Trump Administration wants to wrap up an agreement on a modified treaty by the end of the year.

That’s an ambitious timetable, considering the White House’s lengthy list of negotiating objectives — and concerns in Canada and Mexico that President Trump views trade as a zero-sum game. The unspoken question hovering over the talks is this: Can Trump find a way for America to “win” in trade without Mexico and Canada losing?

Gerwin for US News, “Trump the NAFTA Terminator”

Posted on November 15, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The president is making moves to terminate NAFTA without considering the economic and legal repercussions.

Donald Trump has few positive achievements as president. But the man famous for firing people has certainly shown a knack as a terminator: Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership and terminated a variety of other Obama administration initiatives.

Now, Trump is seemingly set on terminating NAFTA, which he’s derided as “the worst trade deal ever.” Congress must stop Trump before he kills again.

Congress has been remarkably mute on Trump’s threats to NAFTA, even though the Constitution empowers Congress “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” and much of the president’s authority on trade is based on laws passed by Congress. It’s time for Congress to use its powers – and broader influence – to prevent Trump from damaging U.S. trade, destroying jobs and sowing economic uncertainty by recklessly withdrawing from NAFTA.

Continue reading at U.S. News.

Kim for The American Interest, “One of These Governors Could Save the Democrats in 2020”

Posted on October 24, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

State-level Democratic leaders are showing how populism and pragmatism combined can energize liberal turnout while still winning crucial swing-state support.

Under a clear blue sky in late summer, with the peaks of the Gallatin Mountains as a backdrop, Montana Governor Steve Bullock mingles with guests at a private event on a ranch just outside Bozeman. Holding a plate piled high with barbecue, Bullock is half a head taller than most of the people here. He is genial and relaxed, in jeans and battered brown shoes. His nametag reads, “Governor Steve.”

A young mother brings over two little girls in flowered sundresses, and Bullock immediately drops down to eye level. A few minutes later, the girls leave with their mother, smiles on their faces, their votes no doubt locked up for 15 years hence when the girls will be old enough to cast a ballot. In half the conversations that swirl around Bullock, there are joking references to 2020 and hints about the Governor’s ambitions. It’s an open secret here that the Bullock might be running for President.

Just this past fall, Bullock won re-election over GOP challenger billionaire Greg Gianforte by four percentage points—50 percent to 46 percent—in a state where only 35 percent of voters chose Democrat Hillary Clinton for President and Donald Trump won by 20 points. That victory is Bullock’s calling card into the Democratic presidential sweepstakes, along with the prairie populist credentials he has burnished. As the state’s Attorney General, he endeared himself to sportsmen by authoring a state opinion guaranteeing access to public lands. He also took on the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, defending the state’s ban on corporate spending (he lost when the Court reaffirmed its decision).

Continue reading at The American Interest.

The Next Ten Million Jobs–How to Read Tomorrow’s Employment Projections

Posted on October 23, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tomorrow (October 24th), the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the latest version of their ten-year employment projections. They will likely project job growth of roughly ten million jobs over the next ten years.

Generally what gets the most attention is the BLS list of the fastest growing occupations, and those are certainly interesting. But as part of our The Next Ten Million Jobs project, we suggest that the job projections should really be sorted into three buckets. The first bucket consists of jobs in the health and education sector, both private and public. The previous set of BLS projections, released in 2015, suggested that 48% of net new job growth over the next decade would come from health and education. That’s stunning. Will the new projections be higher or lower, and can we afford to pay for all these health and education jobs?

The second bucket consists of jobs in the tech sector, such as computer systems design and software publishing. The last set of projections pegged those industries at roughly 6% of future job growth. We think that is greatly understated, and expect that number to rise. Moreover, the tech job growth can be found outside of the traditional tech hubs, as our report shows.

Finally, the third bucket consists of tech-enabled jobs in physical industries such as ecommerce, manufacturing, and agriculture. Here the previous set of projections did very poorly. For example, the BLS predicted that the warehouse and storage industry would expand by a very meager 28K jobs by 2024. Instead warehousing jobs have soared by 200K jobs over the last 3 years alone, riding the wave of ecommerce fulfillment centers. Moreover, the BLS does not have a separate projection for electronic shopping companies.

We believe that tech-enabled jobs in physical industries are going to be an extremely important source of job growth over the next ten years–but these are not broken out in the BLS projections. What’s more, these jobs are going to mainly benefit states that have been left behind behind by the digital revolution.

Stay tuned.

Ecommerce employment update for October

Posted on October 16, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

With the publication of my WSJ op-ed, “Get Ready for the Internet of Goods,” it’s time to update our ecommerce analysis for the third quarter. Rather than reaching back to 2007, as previously, I want to focus on a more recent period. First, take a look at the chart below, which graphs the full-time equivalent (FTE) employment for brick-and-mortar retail, with a 3-month moving average.

On a quarterly basis, brick-and-mortar FTE peaked in the third quarter of 2015, and since then has been drifting down at about a half percent annually. The figure for brick-and-mortar FTE in the third quarter of 2017 is probably a bit lower than it should be because of the effects of Hurricanes Harvey and Maria on hours worked in retail.

So let’s look at the two years since brick-and-mortar FTE peaked. Over those two years, brick-and-mortar retail FTE jobs fell by 123,000. That’s a decline of about 1%. The increase in FTE ecommerce jobs was 178,000 over the same stretch. That’s based on hours worked in the electronic shopping and mail-order industry, and the warehousing industry, where many fulfillment centers are reported. FTE jobs at couriers and messengers, including express delivery companies, rose by 58,000. All told, the gains in ecommerce and delivery services was almost twice the size of the losses in brick=and-mortar retail.

Change in FTE jobs, 3Q15-3Q17 (thousands)

Brick-and-mortar retail -123

Ecommerce +178

Express delivery and couriers +58

Data: BLS, PPI.

Several points: First, FTE adjusts for changes in hours worked per week. Second, we now see a significant employment impact on the delivery side. To put it a different way, those UPS drivers are working way hard. Third, a portion of the third quarter decline in brick-and-mortar FTE is likely to be due to Hurricanes Harvey and Maria reducing the number of hours for retail workers in Texas, Florida, and other storm-hit areas..

Iowa’s App Economy: A Summary

Posted on October 12, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

When it comes to tech jobs, global hubs like Silicon Valley, New York, and Austin get all the attention. But, to an increasing degree, our research shows tech-driven employment growth is not restricted to those high-profile areas.

For example, our widely-cited March 2017 report “How the Startup Economy is Spreading Across the Country—and How It Can Be Accelerated” demonstrated that the startup mentality could be found in many regions. And our new report (“The Next Ten Million Jobs”) finds that tech and tech-related jobs grew by 51% in the “Heartland” states from 2007 to 2016, only slightly slower than the nation as a whole. In Iowa, tech and tech-related jobs grew by 83% over the same period (Figure 1), accounting for almost one-quarter of private-sector nonfarm job growth (Table 1).

The App Economy in Europe: Leading Countries and Cities, 2017

Posted on October 9, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In this new paper, we estimate that the European App Economy totals 1.89 million jobs as of January 2017, an increase of roughly 15 percent over a year earlier. In addition, this paper estimates the number of App Economy jobs by country and as a percentage of all jobs on a country-by-country basis. Next, we provide an overall and country-by-country breakdown of App Economy employment by operating system, comparing the number of jobs in the iOS ecosystem with the number of jobs in the Android ecosystem. Finally, we provide a ranking of the top 30 App Economy cities in Europe.