issue: Small Business & Entrepreneurship

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Need for high-tech workers is critical

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A PPI report on the growth of the tech economy was referenced in this piece from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Thanks to growing companies like Citi, Enterprise, NISC, ESRI, Curas, BoardPaq and many others, St. Charles County is a strong part of the ‘Silicon Prairie’ in metro St. Louis and the Midwest,” Ehlmann said. “There are tremendous opportunities right now and for the foreseeable future for our residents to pursue lucrative careers in information technology or to pursue an entrepreneurial dream in IT.”

The Progressive Policy Institute ranked St. Charles County “one of America’s top 25 tech counties” in a 2015 report on high-tech job growth.”

Read the entirety of the article at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

PPI Poll: Swing Voters In Swing States Hold Balance In 2016

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In this era of political polarization, it is tempting to assume the political center no longer exists. If this were true, it would certainly simplify things for political candidates and their strategists. They could stop worrying about how to persuade unaligned voters and concentrate exclusively on mobilizing their core partisans. However, this is not the case. As this new Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) poll by veteran Democratic pollster Peter Brodnitz shows, Swing voters exist, and they hold the balance of power in key 2016 battleground states. For Democrats especially, this survey yields a clear lesson: To hold the White House, recapture the Senate, and reduce the Republican House majority, candidates must craft messages that appeal beyond the party’s base to a substantial body of voters who are not in a fixed ideological camp.

This survey examined the outlook and attitudes of Swing voters in four critical Swing states: Florida, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. Constituting about a fifth of the electorate in those states, Swing voters come at today’s major challenges with a perspective different from that of either party. In general, they are less ideological, less partisan, and less angry than base voters. They are pragmatists who are focused mainly on economic growth and competitiveness.

Swing voters give low approval ratings to both parties in Congress, but slightly higher approval ratings to Democrats (32% approve, 59% disapprove), than to Republicans (28% approve, 65% disapprove). While Republicans give their own Members of Congress better marks than Democrats, Republicans in Congress are underwater among their own voters by eleven points (43% approve, 54% disapprove). Democrats, on the other hand, largely approve of the jobs their Members of Congress are doing (73% approve, 24% disapprove).

There is widespread agreement among battleground voters on a number of matters:

  • Most battleground voters rate the economy as fair or poor as opposed to excellent or good. They believe that improving the economy should be the priority, that moving jobs overseas is a key economic problem, and that increasing access to education and job training is essential.
  • Most of them also believe that America’s economy is still strong, and that if people work hard, they can get ahead.
  • Almost all believe it is essential that American companies can compete globally and that workers benefit from that competition and success.
  • While Democrats are the most likely to believe the United States is the strongest economic power in the world (81% agree), most Swing voters (58% agree) and Republicans (61%) hold this view.
  • Despite all the populist rhetoric deployed in both parties’ nominating contests, the voters we interviewed don’t seem particularly angry. Swing voters tend to be worried about the economy and Democrats tend to be optimistic, but few described themselves as angry.

Most believe global competition – more than trade agreements – is the force driving away jobs. There is little support among Swing voters for ending trade agreements, and most believe the benefits of trade agreements outweigh the costs.

  • Almost all believe “most” Americans are not prepared for retirement.
  • Almost all believe increased investments in infrastructure, like roads and bridges, would improve the U.S. economy.

In general, Swing voters are attracted to new ideas for stimulating growth — regulatory improvement, low corporate taxes intended to increase competitiveness and keep jobs from moving overseas, and a robust career pathways system that’s always there to help workers acquire marketable skills.

 

Download “2016.04-PPI-Poll_Swing-Voters-in-Swing-States.pdf”

CNN: America needs more than populist message

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With Donald Trump and Ted Cruz locked in a bitter battle for the Republican nomination, the stakes in 2016 rise dramatically. The likely victory of either one of these deeply flawed candidates will give Democrats a chance not only to hold the White House, but also to realign U.S. politics. No wonder Republicans are panicking.

To seize the opportunity, however, Hillary Clinton will need to transcend the limits of a “populist” message based on identity politics, economic victimhood and redistribution. Thus far such themes have dominated the nomination battle with Sen. Bernie Sanders, but they won’t help Democrats forge a broader political coalition that includes suburban moderates, college-educated independents and many Republicans who are aghast at the prospect of branding the White House with a giant “T.”
Of course, with yet another caucus victory on Saturday, this time in Wyoming, Sanders will stay in the race, if only to keep tugging Clinton to the left. But Clinton needs to resist this ideological gravity, because Sanders’ left-wing populism is not an effective answer to the right-wing populism that Trump channels with such diabolic cunning.
Before the Bernie Bots clank into action, let me hasten to say I’m not positing moral equivalence between Sanders and Trump. Sanders is honest, principled and decent; Trump is, well, none of those things. But the lifelong socialist’s dream of turning America into a paternalistic, European-style welfare state isn’t the right prescription for what ails our country.
Continue reading at CNN.

PPI Tackles Tax Disputes in Europe

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week, PPI led a bipartisan delegation of 10 high-ranking Congressional staffers to London and Brussels, which is still grieving in the aftermath of the March 22 terrorist attacks. Our visit there so soon after the atrocity was greeted warmly as an act of transatlantic solidarity.

The Digital Economy Study Group was the third such delegation PPI has taken to Europe in as many years. Our mission is to engage influential government and private leaders in exploring common ways to tackle our mutual dilemma of slow growth and stalled social mobility. We believe more innovation and growth are the best antidotes to the virulent strains of populism that are warping democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

Our trip began last Tuesday in London at 10 Downing Street, where Daniel Korski, deputy head of policy for Prime Minister David Cameron, briefed our delegation on the government’s efforts—including a low-tax patent or innovation box—to encourage greater digital investment in the UK. Then it was on to Westminster, where Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger led the group on an entertaining tour of Parliament, which also included a brisk dissection of Britain’s controversial Pay As You Earn (PAYE) tax.

Also at Parliament, Labour MP Meg Hillier, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, defended the government’s diverted profits tax as a response to public anger over the tax avoidance strategies of international companies. At breakfast the next day, veteran Labour MP John Spellar offered a trenchant analysis of how economic change and slow growth have scrambled British politics and led directly to June’s “Brexit” referendum. At UK Treasury, Financial Secretary David Gauke explained how recent reforms to corporate tax rules have resulted in greater foreign investment and business creation.

On Thursday, we took the Eurostar to Brussels, where the U.S. Mission to the European Union briefed us on difficult aspects of the US-EU economic relationship, including the new “Privacy Shield” agreement, international tax policy, and the TTIP trade pact. At the European Commission’s powerful Competition directorate, the group had a robust exchange of views with officials overseeing “state aid” investigations that have called into question tax agreements negotiated by EU member states and U.S. companies. We expect these issues resurfaced this week when Commissioner Margarethe Vestager visited Washington for talks with Congress and the administration.

Later, officials at DG CONNECT briefed the group on Europe’s efforts to establish a digital single market and plans for “platform regulation” to create space for European tech companies to grow. On Friday, the DG GROW team discussed their wide-ranging efforts to spur entrepreneurship and digital skills building across Europe. The growing gulf between U.S. and European views on tax policy also was the subject of a lunch with Bart Van Humbeeck, economic advisor to Kris Peeters, Vice-Prime Minister of Belgium, hosted by Paul Hofheinz of the Lisbon Council. Our last official meeting was with PPI friend Ann Mettler, Head of the European Strategy Centre, an in-house think tank for EU President Jean-Claude Junker.

These frank and in-depth discussions enabled us and Congressional staff to get a better understanding of the sometimes byzantine workings of the EU, as well as its often different perspectives on issues vital to both sides—privacy and cross-border data flows, digital innovation, trade, tax, copyright and more. The visits also have impressed on our European friends that U.S. policymakers are paying closer attention to such issues. PPI’s hope is to nudge these sometimes contentious conversations to common ground, and strengthen the fraying bonds of transatlantic economic cooperation.

Press Release: PPI Unveils New Blueprint for Shared Prosperity

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 15, 2016

Contact: Cody Tucker, 202-775-0106
or ctucker@ppionline.org

A Progressive Alternative to Populism

PPI Unveils New Blueprint for Shared Prosperity

WASHINGTON—The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism, a new blueprint for renewing America’s economic dynamism.

The plan offers an array of creative proposals for accelerating the “digitization” of the physical economy; lowering regulatory obstacles to innovation and entrepreneurship; launching a new public works push; adopting pro-growth tax reform; grooming the world’s most talented workers; and enabling working families to escape poverty and build middle class wealth.

The blueprint also takes aim at the populist anger that has figured prominently in campaign 2016:

…[P]opulists do Americans no favors by claiming the economic game is hopelessly rigged against them, that the leaders they elect are incompetents, or that our democracy is rancid with corruption. None of these claims is true, and such demagoguery undermines public confidence in America’s boundless capacity for self-renewal. Populist anger fosters an ‘us versus them’ mentality that, by reinforcing political tribalism and social mistrust, can only make it harder to build consensus around economic initiatives that benefit all Americans.

“We believe progressives owe U.S. voters a hope-inspiring alternative to populist outrage and the false remedies of nativism, protectionism and democratic socialism,” writes Will Marshall, PPI President.

“I encourage anyone looking for optimistic ideas to create more jobs, wealth, and prosperity for hard working Americans to read PPI’s new report using innovation to spur growth,” said Congressman Ron Kind (D-Wis.), Chairman of the New Democrat Coalition. “This report is full of forward thinking policy initiatives that help grow the American economy.”

“In the midst of today’s populist uprising, it’s up to our leaders to recognize the real reasons why our economy isn’t working for everyone and to fight for effective solutions,” said Governor Jack Markell (D-Del.). “PPI’s blueprint gives policymakers a roadmap to create opportunity for all Americans by harnessing the unstoppable forces of globalization and technological innovation, while opposing the impractical, and sometimes dangerous, proposals offered by the political extremes.”

The anger on which populists feed is rooted in a real economic problem: America has been stuck in a slow growth trap since 2000. This long spell of economic stagnation has held down wages and living standards and shrunk the middle class. What the nation needs is a forward-looking plan for moving the U.S. economy into high gear. Instead, as the PPI blueprint notes, today’s populists peddle nostalgia for our country’s past industrial glory but offer few practical ideas for building new American prosperity in today’s global knowledge economy.

Unleashing Innovation and Growth seeks to fill this vacuum in the presidential campaign, offering bold ideas for unleashing the collective ingenuity of the American people—harnessing disruptive change, raising skills, lowering tax and regulatory barriers to individual initiative and creativity, and experimenting with innovative ways to rebuild middle class wealth and enable more Americans to exit poverty.

Summary of Key Proposals

Unleash Innovation
• Spread innovation across the economy: Adopt a new “Innovation Platform” aimed at stimulating public and private investment in new ideas and enterprises, and at diffusing innovation across the entire economy.
• Improve the regulatory climate for innovation: Tackle the mounting costs of regulatory accumulation, the constant layering of new rules atop old ones; Make systemic changes to regulatory agencies to make promoting investment, innovation and new enterprises part of their core mission; Rein in occupational licensing requirements that screen out many low-income entrepreneurs; Lift outdated restrictions on lending to small business; give businesses incentives to offer more flexible work, including paid leave.
• Innovate our way to clean growth: Implement a more innovative energy strategy that simultaneously advances two vital interests: powering economic growth and assuring a healthy environment; Recognize that, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. and the world will have to tap all fuels—renewable, nuclear, and fossil—to meet growing energy demand and sustain global economic growth; Institute a nationwide carbon tax to curb greenhouse emissions while driving investment to clean and efficient energy.
• Democratize trade: Sell more of America’s highly competitive exports to a growing global middle class; promote the free flow of data across global borders; support innovative trade agreements, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that lift labor, environment and human rights standards in developing countries and enable more Americans to benefit from trade; Seize new opportunities for U.S. small businesses and entrepreneurs to use low-cost digital platforms to tap into global growth.

Align Fiscal Policy with Innovation and Growth
• Embrace pro-growth tax reform: Advocate for a dramatic shift from income to consumption taxes to stimulate investment in productive economic activities rather than those favored by the current tax code; Close loopholes that benefit special interests and dramatically simplify taxes for most Americans; Raise enough money to cut corporate income taxes down to globally competitive levels, and reduce taxes that penalize innovation and hiring.
• Modernize public works: Accurately measure the true economic impact of infrastructure spending; open infrastructure markets to private capital; define a strategic role for Washington through a national infrastructure bank; impose firm deadlines on project approvals and licensing process.

Groom the World’s Most Talented Workers
• Reinvent public school: Champion new models of school governance that enable more school autonomy and innovation, more customized learning, rigorous standards, and genuine accountability and results.
• Create new pathways into middle class jobs: Create a more promising approach to “career pathways” by combining classroom training and work experience through a sequence of jobs, within or across firms in an industry, and a sequence of credentials that signal their growing skill levels.
• Cut college costs for everyone: Rein in costs and decrease debt by encouraging colleges to offer three-year degrees rather than the traditional four-year program and focus policies on competency, rather than credit hours.

Build Middle Class Wealth
• Narrow the wealth gap with universal pensions: Champion “universal pension” accounts that would enable all workers to save for retirement, navigate the maze of tax-favored retirement plans, and take their pensions with them when changing jobs.
• Help families save for homeownership: Tackle the twin problems of declining homeownership and souring housing costs for both owners and renters by creating a new, tax-preferred mechanism for down payment savings—“Home K”—to lower obstacles to homeownership, like tight credit and down payment requirements, for first-time homebuyers and to promote savings.

Fight Poverty with Empowerment
• Empower people with smart phones: Use modern technology to cut through bureaucratic barriers to government safety net programs, consolidate benefit streams, enable people living in poverty more access to the information they need, and apply online for social supports; Encourage federal, state, and local governments to create online H.O.P.E. (Health, Opportunity, and Personal Empowerment) accounts and action plans.
• Expand housing choices for low-income Americans: Convert some federal rent subsidies into incentives for homeownership to relieve the burden on low-income families of high housing costs and reduce the waiting list for subsidized housing, without raising taxes or adding to the federal deficit.

Download Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism.

Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As Americans choose a new president in 2016, populist anger dominates the campaign. To hear Donald Trump or Senator Bernie Sanders tell it, America is either a global doormat or a sham democracy controlled by the “one percent.” These dark narratives are caricatures, but they do stem from a real dilemma: America is stuck in a slow- growth trap that holds down wages and living standards. How to break this long spell of economic stagnation is the central question in this election.

Today’s populists peddle nostalgia for our country’s past industrial glory but offer few practical ideas for building a new American prosperity in today’s global knowledge economy. Progressives owe U.S. voters a hopeful alternative to populist outrage and the false panaceas of nativism, protectionism, and democratic socialism. What America needs is a forward-looking plan to unleash innovation, stimulate productive investment, groom the world’s most talented workers, and put our economy back on a high-growth path. It’s time to banish fear and pessimism and trust instead in the liberal and individualist values and enterprising culture that have always made America great.

Download Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism

Washington Post: The new Democratic Party proposal to rival Bernie Sanders’ socialism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Simplicity is one of Bernie Sanders’ great strengths: Corporations and the rich have rigged the economy. His solutions sound simple, even when the plans behind them are complicated: college for all, health care for all, tax the rich, break up big banks. He trails Hillary Clinton in presidential delegates to this point, and he remains an underdog for the Democratic nomination, but Sanders has already pulled Clinton, and the party, toward a more populist, more socialist policy agenda, thanks in part to that clarity of message.

The centrist Democrats who oppose that leftward lurch have struggled to match his simplicity. They tend to view the economy through a lens of skills and adaptation, not power and treachery. Many of them pushed in the 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, to expand global trade and deregulate the financial sector. They now concede those efforts did not go according to script, particularly for middle-class workers, but they are not calling for a full rewrite in response.

Their risk, in this election and moving forward, is to define themselves solely as anti-Democratic-socialist – the folks who don’t like the stuff that a lot of Democrats like about Sanders.

The Progressive Policy Institute is the latest centrist Democratic institution to try to counter that image. Today it will release what its president, Will Marshall, calls a “radical” agenda to get America working for the working class again. The report is called “Unleashing Innovation and Growth: a Progressive Alternative to Populism,” and it is organized around a straightforward, if not perfectly simple, principle.

Read more at The Washington Post

Miami Herald: Florida’s innovation engine sputtering, recent analyses show

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Reporting on the state of Florida’s app economy, Miami Herald‘s Nancy Dahlberg uses data collected by Dr. Michael Mandel

The Progressive Policy Institute’s Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel recently released a list of the top 25 App Economy states that ranked Florida sixth in the nation for the number of jobs, with more than 59,000 “app economy jobs” in December 2015, up from 15,000 in April 2012.

However, when the institute measured the number of app economy jobs against all the other jobs in the state and ranked the share of app economy jobs in the workforce — what it calls its “app intensity” ranking — Florida fell to 28th, a spokesman said.

Read the article in its entirety at the Miami Herald.

Dallas Business Journal: Texas finds roughly half of its mobile application-related jobs in DFW

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Dallas Business Journal cites data collected by PPI’s chief economic strategist Michael Mandel on the growth of App Economy jobs in Dallas, Texas:

The Progressive Policy Institute based in Washington, D.C., reported that the DFW region comprised 44 percent of the states workforce within the space in the month of December. The data includes development jobs as well as jobs that are indirectly related to the mobile app economy.

‘It was kind of a surprise,’ said Michael Mandel, PPI chief economic strategist, adding that the area is not the first region typically expected to have a high percentage of this specific workforce. ‘We saw a lot of growth in places like Chicago, Dallas and New York – outside the traditional tech areas.’

Read the article in its entirety at Dallas Business Journal.

PPI to Congress: Scrub the SCRUB Act

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

House Republicans this week are expected to take up the ponderously titled Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act (SCRUB) of 2015 (H.R. 1155). The Progressive Policy Institute, a strong advocate for regulatory improvement, urges progressives to oppose this highly partisan bill.

Over the last three years, PPI has worked with reform-minded Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as Independent Senator Angus King, to develop a more effective way of dealing with the problem of “regulatory accumulation,” the relentless buildup of rules over time. Sadly, House Republicans have chosen to ignore a bipartisan bill—the Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015 (H.R. 1407)—in favor of the SCRUB Act, a conservative favorite that stands little chance of winning Democratic support.

Both bills have in common the creation of an independent commission charged with winnowing outdated, duplicative or overly burdensome federal regulations. There, the similarities mostly end. And while the House’s latest version of the SCRUB Act clearly has been tweaked in response to criticism from regulatory experts, it still fails on three grounds:

First, the bill caters to conservative demands to roll back existing regulations and make it harder to issue new ones. Rather than mandate careful consideration of rules widely thought to be in need of elimination or improvement, it requires the commission to cut regulatory costs by 15 percent—an arbitrary goal with no clear policy rationale. And while SCRUB’s vague, nonbinding language gives priority to examining “older major rules,” it could open the door to fresh assaults on favorite conservative targets: rules implementing Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan. The Regulatory Improvement Act, on the other hand, explicitly prohibits consideration of rules less than ten years old by its commission.

Second, the SCRUB Act enshrines a foolishly impractical “Regulatory Cut-Go” mandate. Under this procedure, no federal agency could issue a new rule unless it cut old ones that impose equal “costs” on the economy. The idea is to offset the cost of new regulations by killing old ones. This attempt to make regulation a zero-sum game would create pressures to target cost-effective rules for elimination based on highly imprecise estimates of what a new rule might cost—and with no consideration of the many public benefits of regulation.

Third, the SCRUB Act has zero support among House and Senate Democratic leaders or within the Obama administration. As a conservative “message” vehicle, rather than a serious legislative proposal, the bill will likely die in the Senate before it can be vetoed. In contrast, the House version of the Regulatory Improvement Act introduced by Congressmen Patrick Murphy (D-FL) and Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), has an equal number of Democratic and Republican co-sponsors. Defying the logic of polarization, it builds political support for smarter regulation from the center out.

At the core of this legislation is the Regulatory Improvement Commission—an independent, bipartisan commission under Congressional authority ensuring there is no hidden regulatory agenda. Consisting of nine members appointed by the president and Congress, the commission, after a formal regulatory review, would submit a list of regulatory changes to Congress for an up-or-down vote without amendment. This approach would build political trust and lay the groundwork for further rounds of regulatory review and revision.

Most important of all, the Regulatory Improvement Commission would lift the burden of regulation accumulation from the backs of U.S. workers, businesses, and taxpayers. It would reduce compliance costs and—most crucially—the opportunity costs that accrue when entrepreneurs and business managers spend their energies on complying with unnecessary rules rather than creating value.

PPI urges progressives to support a more politically viable mechanism for improving the regulatory environment for economic innovation and growth—the Regulatory Improvement Act.

The Hill: Gerwin On the TPP and Small-Business

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI Senior Fellow for Trade and Global Opportunity Ed Gerwin was quoted by The Hill‘s Vicki Needham commenting on the positive effect Obama’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would have on American small-businesses:

“Ed Gerwin, a senior fellow for trade and global opportunity at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), said that the business groups must help to convince lawmakers that the deal will benefit their home states and districts.

Gerwin, who argues that small business will gain a significant benefit from the TPP, said that ‘this trade agreement is really more about what’s going to happen in Washington state than what’s going to happen in Washington, D.C.'”

Read the article in its entirety at The Hill.

PPI Urges Congress to Support Internet Tax Freedom Act

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

WASHINGTON—The Progressive Policy Institute today released the following statement urging Congress to pass the Internet Tax Freedom Act:

“The development of the Internet has been the single biggest driver of growth in the United States over the last two decades, disrupting and transforming industries in every corner of our economy. Not only has it been the most valuable resource for America’s entrepreneurs and innovators, but along with its advancement has come innumerable positive externalities that have spread broadly across the rest of the economy benefitting us all. That’s why, for nearly twenty years, PPI has opposed the taxation on Internet access by states and localities that threatens to stunt the future growth and dynamism of the Internet ecosystem.

“PPI is pleased to see the Internet Tax Freedom Act (ITFA), which would permanently block these taxes on access, included in the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act currently being considered in Congress, and we urge pro-growth Democrats to support its passage. We would also like to thank Senator Ron Wyden for championing this issue since he first introduced the original ITFA in 1998 on behalf of millions of Americans whose livelihoods rely on a healthy, open and viable Internet.”

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The 2015 PPI Tech/Info Job Ranking

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This policy brief reports the top 25 tech counties in the country, based on the 2015 PPI Tech/Info Job Index.

The top three counties are in the Bay Area—first is San Francisco Country, followed by Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley), and San Mateo County. Travis County, home of Austin, Texas, takes fourth place, with Utah County (Provo, Utah) ranking fifth.

The top 25 list also includes well-known tech hubs such as King County (Seattle), New York County (New York City), Middlesex County (Cambridge, Mass.) and Suffolk County (Boston). However, the PPI Tech/Info Job Index also identifies some unexpectedly strong performers, including East Baton Rouge Parish (Baton Rouge, La.) and St. Charles County (St. Louis, Mo. Metro Area).

This is the third year that we have ranked counties by the PPI Tech/Info Job Index, which is based on the number of jobs added in their tech/info industries from 2011 to 2014, relative to the size of the local economy. PPI defines the tech/info sector as including telecom, tech, and content industries, including wired and wireless telecom, Internet search and publishing, and movie production (see complete list of included industries in the methodology section).

As in previous years, we find that the local economies with the highest PPI Tech/Info Job Index tend to have a faster growth rate of non-tech jobs. This result supports the proposition that benefits from a strong tech/info sector spill over to the rest of the local economy.

Download “2015.12-Mandel-Di-Ionno_The-2015-PPI-Tech-Info-Job-Ranking”

WSJ: Small Businesses With a Big Stake in the Pacific Trade Deal

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

During the seven years that the Trans-Pacific Partnership was being negotiated, critics repeatedly claimed that the trade agreement wouldn’t be about trade or cutting tariffs but, instead, would primarily advance the special interests of large multinationals. Economist Joseph Stiglitz, for example, warned that the TPP could “benefit the wealthiest sliver of the American and global elite at the expense of everyone else.”

The negotiations are now over, and the full text of the agreement, released on Nov. 5, tells a different story. Notably, the agreement includes groundbreaking provisions that better enable smaller businesses to prosper by exporting to the 12 countries that are in the partnership. The growing markets in these countries account for some 40% of the global economy.

Ninety-eight percent of America’s 300,000 exporters are small or medium-size enterprises (SMEs)—firms with fewer than 500 employees. Together they account for about a third of the $1.6 trillion in annual goods exports. And because only 5% of SMEs currently export, there’s a significant potential for growth.

Small businesses account for almost two-thirds of America’s net new jobs and—according to economists—are essential building blocks for economic mobility. Smaller firms that export are especially prolific creators of good jobs for diverse groups. Census Bureau data show that the average American women-owned exporter, for example, employs five times more workers and pays an average salary almost $17,000 more than women-owned non-exporters. Similarly, minority-owned exporters employ three times more workers and pay nearly $16,000 more.

Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal.