As
the United States seeks to reinvigorate its job market and move past
economic recession, MIT News examines manufacturing’s role in the
country’s economic future through this series on work at the Institute
around manufacturing.
The
loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs is a topic that can provoke heated
arguments about globalization. But what do the cold, hard numbers
reveal? How has the rise in foreign manufacturing competition actually
affected the U.S. economy and its workers?
A
new study co-authored by MIT economist David Autor shows that the rapid
rise in low-wage manufacturing industries overseas has indeed had a
significant impact on the United States. The disappearance of U.S.
manufacturing jobs frequently leaves former manufacturing workers
unemployed for years, if not permanently, while creating a drag on local
economies and raising the amount of taxpayer-borne social insurance
necessary to keep workers and their families afloat.
Geographically,
the research shows, foreign competition has hurt many U.S. metropolitan
areas—not necessarily the ones built around heavy manufacturing in the
industrial Midwest, but many areas in the South, the West and the
Northeast, which once had abundant manual-labor manufacturing jobs,
often involving the production of clothing, footwear, luggage, furniture
and other household consumer items. Many of these jobs were held by
workers without college degrees, who have since found it hard to gain
new employment.
“The
effects are very concentrated and very visible locally,” says Autor,
professor and associate head of MIT’s Department of Economics. “People
drop out of the labor force, and the data strongly suggest that it takes
some people a long time to get back on their feet, if they do at all.”
Moreover, Autor notes, when a large manufacturer closes its doors, “it
does not simply affect an industry, but affects a whole locality.”
In
the study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of
Economic Research, Autor, along with economists David Dorn and Gordon
Hanson, examined the effect of overseas manufacturing competition on 722
locales across the United States over the last two decades. This is
also a research focus of MIT’s ongoing study group about manufacturing,
Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE); Autor is one of 20 faculty
members on the PIE commission.
The
findings highlight the complex effects of globalization on the United
States. “Trade tends to create diffuse beneficiaries and a concentration
of losers,” Autor says. “All of us get slightly cheaper goods, and
we’re each a couple hundred dollars a year richer for that.” But those
losing jobs, he notes, are “a lot worse off.” For this reason, Autor
adds, policymakers need new responses to the loss of manufacturing jobs:
“I’m not anti-trade, but it is important to realize that there are
reasons why people worry about this issue.”
Double trouble: businesses, consumers both spend less when industry leaves
In
the paper, Autor, Dorn (of the Center for Monetary and Fiscal Studies
in Madrid, Spain) and Hanson (of the University of California at San
Diego) specifically study the effects of rising manufacturing
competition from China, looking at the years 1990 to 2007. At the start
of that period, low-income countries accounted for only about 3 percent
of U.S. manufacturing imports; by 2007, that figure had increased to
about 12 percent, with China representing 91 percent of the increase.
The
types of manufacturing for export that grew most rapidly in China
during that time included the production of textiles, clothes, shoes,
leather goods, rubber products—and one notable high-tech area, computer
assembly. Most of these production activities involve soft materials and
hands-on finishing work. “These are labor-intensive, low-value-added
[forms of] production,” Autor says. “Certainly the Chinese are moving up
the value chain, but basically China has been most active in low-end
goods.”
In
conducting the study, the researchers found more pronounced economic
problems in cities most vulnerable to the rise of low-wage Chinese
manufacturing; these include San Jose, Calif.; Providence, R.I.;
Manchester, N.H.; and a raft of urban areas below the Mason-Dixon
line—the leading example being Raleigh, N.C. “The areas that are most
exposed to China trade are not the Rust Belt industries,” Autor says.
“They are places like the South, where manufacturing was rising, not
falling, through the 1980s.”
All
told, as American imports from China grew more than tenfold between
1991 and 2007, roughly a million U.S. workers lost jobs due to increased
low-wage competition from China—about a quarter of all U.S. job losses
in manufacturing during the time period.
And
as the study shows, when businesses shut down, it hurts the local
economy because of two related but distinct “spillover effects,” as
economists say: The shuttered businesses no longer need goods and
services from local non-manufacturing firms, and their former workers
have less money to spend locally as well.
A
city at the 75th percentile of exposure to Chinese manufacturing,
compared to one at the 25th percentile, will have roughly a 5% decrease
in the number of manufacturing jobs and an increase of about $65 per
capita in the amount of social insurance needed, such as unemployment
insurance, health care insurance and disability payments.
“People
like to think that workers flow freely across sectors, but in reality,
they don’t,” Autor says. At a conservative estimate, that $65 per capita
wipes out one-third of the per-capita gains realized by trade with
China, in the form of cheaper goods. “Those numbers are really
startling,” Autor adds.
The
study draws on United Nations data on international trade by goods
category among developing and developed countries, combined with U.S.
economic data from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis
and the Social Security Administration. The study received funding from
the National Science Foundation, Spanish Ministry of Science and
Innovation, and the Community of Madrid.
The
paper has already generated discussion among economists focused on this
issue. The large effect found in the paper of overseas competition on
U.S. unemployment is “quite plausible, from my experience of surveying
and talking to manufacturers,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economist at
Stanford University. “That was an important figure, it’s been very
well-estimated, they’ve done as good a job as you can.” Bloom also
thinks the paper’s analysis of the rise in social insurance payments is
“ingenious,” and of value to policymakers.
New policies for a new era?
In
Autor’s view, the findings mean the United States needs to improve its
policy response to the problem of disappearing jobs. “We do not have a
good set of policies at present for helping workers adjust to trade or,
for that matter, to any kind of technological change,” he says.
For
one thing, Autor says, “We could have much better adjustment
assistance—programs that are less fragmented, and less stingy.” The
federal government’s Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program provides
temporary benefits to Americans who have lost jobs as a result of
foreign trade. But as Autor, Dorn and Hanson estimate in the paper, in
areas affected by new Chinese manufacturing, the increase in disability
payments is a whopping 30 times as great as the increase in TAA
benefits.
Therefore,
Autor thinks, well-designed job-training programs would help the
government’s assistance efforts become “directed toward helping people
reintegrate into the labor market and acquire skills, rather than
helping them exit the labor market.”
Still,
it will likely take more research to get a better idea of what the
post-employment experience is like for most people. To this end, Autor,
Dorn and Hanson are conducting a new study that follows laid-off
manufacturing workers over time, nationally, to get a fine-grained sense
of their needs and potential to be re-employed.
“Trade
may raise GDP,” Autor says, “but it does make some people worse off.
Almost all of us share in the gains. We could readily assist the
minority of citizens who bear a disproportionate share of the costs and
still be better off in the aggregate.”