Gotcha on the Gotchas

Nationally syndicated columnist Neal Peirce’s column which appears in the Seattle Times today should be taped on bulletin boards, forwarded in chain emails, become a cause of the week on Facebook and tweeted about throughout the land. He talks about the need for local officials to travel on business and study missions overseas.  Money paragraph:

Are we ready to retire the old bugaboo that any American mayor better think twice before visiting a foreign city — that the press back home will pillory him or her for “junketeering”?

But What Are We Exporting, and to Who?

I’m loving the ongoing blog back-and-forth about the President’s new National Export Initiative (NEI); it really is what this blog was intended to be: a place for folks from the Puget Sound to discuss and debate economic development issues. But I do think that the dialogue so far has missed out on one important topic: what are we exporting and to who?

Double Dare

Frank, in a comment on my previous post, Doubling Down on Exports, asks an excellent question: “is there any way to really achieve Obama’s goals of doubling exports other than a massive devaluation of the dollar?”  He anticipated my plan to address the currency issue in more detail in another post, mainly this one.

As I noted in my response to Frank, Obama has specifically mentioned the currency issue in relation to his plan to increase U.S. exports. Earlier this week Obama said, “one of the challenges that we’ve got to address internationally is currency rates and how they match up.”  Lots of people are complaining about China keeping the Yuan artificially low. But, we should remember that lots of countries over the last 30 years have been doing the same thing.  As if Toyota doesn’t have enough problems, they and

Doubling Down on Exports

It is not surprising that a U.S. Secretary of Commerce who hails from the most trade dependent state in America would lead the charge to get America to double its exports over the next five years as Obama called for last week in his State of the Union speech.  Today, Gary Locke added detailed cargo to the rhetorical container ship Obama steered into the ocean of politics last week (or, uh, something like that). Locke calls the effort to double our country’s exports the National Export Initiative (NEI).  The NEI will increase funding for export promotion, put more emphasis on advocating for U.S. exporters’ interests overseas and create an Export Promotion Cabinet.   The effort also calls for providing more access to credit for exporters by increasing funding for the Export Import Bank from $4 to $6 billion to be chiefly aimed at small and medium size businesses.

Tourism Survey, Part 2

Back in August, we conducted a survey of over 300 international tourists, to find out how accommodating our region is to visitors from other countries. Part Two of that survey is taking place now, where we’re doing a similar survey of study abroad students in Washington state.

That’s What I’ve Been Saying (The Rise of the Puget Sound Auto Industry)

Y’all know that I’ve been beating this drum about how we have an opportunity to grow a regional auto industry here. And it’s been reinforced often. So finally other people are catching on.

Big Events

When I moved here in 2001, it was after the Era of Big Events in Seattle seemed to have ended – no more Goodwill Games, no more NCAA Final Four at the Kingdome, the stymied Olympics bid…we had the MLB all-star game, and that was the last of it.  Maybe it was all the stadium building or the post-9/11 economic bust or the rise of the Lesser Seattle movement, but somehow those huge drivers of tourism and economic impact drifted away.  Until now…

Hopeful Signs For Small Business Growth

As we all try to look ahead and see what the New Year has in store for this region’s economy there are some less visible but possibly more promising early signs of recovery. At the end of 2009 the Business and Economic Development Center celebrated the successes of small businesses from across the state at the 11^th annual UW Minority Business of the Year Awards banquet. The 550+ attendees celebrated the incredible growth that minority-owned businesses have had in this state:

• When the awards program began in 1999 the 50 largest minority-owned businesses in Washington had combined revenues of under $1 billion.
• This year, the 50 largest had combined revenues in excess of $3 billion. And for the first time there’s a minority-owned business, PetroCard Systems of Kent, which has revenues in excess of $1 billion.
• As recently as five years ago companies could get on the largest minority-owned business list with sales of as little as $750,000 and this year, the smallest of the 50 largest businesses had revenues in excess of $3.4 million.
• The fastest growing minority-owned business this year (for the 5^th time in 7 years) comes from the Spokane area. The Spokane Tribal Enterprise Corporation has grown its revenues by more than 760% in the last three years and has grown from just seven employees to nearly 50.
• The 25 fastest growing minority-owned businesses in Washington have added more than 600 jobs in the last three years, despite the recession.

Foreign Talent

In reading the Seattle Times the other day about the signing of Felix I noticed the sidebar listing the largest Mariner contracts in team history (see list below). I noted that half of them went to international ball players, including the top three of Ichiro (Japan), King Felix (Venezuela) and Adrian Beltre (Dominican Republic). This got me to thinking about how important foreign talent is to our economy. Our companies and institutions are full of talented people from abroad.  In Major League Baseball, there is no limit on

“Where are the Recovery Act Dollars” Update, Part 5

As is our monthly ritual, a quick update on major awards and opportunities with regard to the Recovery Act:

Get Your Game On

It’s winter, it’s raining, it’s dark. Playing outside is still a feasible option, but if you prefer to stay warm and dry, then why not choose entertainment that supports one of the region’s fastest growing niche industries: electronic games. If you want to sound more professional, say you’re supporting the “interactive media” industry, which is the same, but refers more inclusively to aerospace and medical applications also being developed in this region, referred to as “serious games” (not that your own Xbox efforts aren’t serious).

Manufacturing in the Central Puget Sound

Last week, the Obama Administration announced another big expenditure from the Recovery Act – $2.3 billion in clean technology manufacturing tax credits to not only create jobs but actually spur investment in mass producing clean tech products. How much of that manufacturing will be done here? $0.00.

In fact, the only Washington company that got any money was our good friends at Ramgen, but it was to produce their exciting new carbon capture technology in upstate New York. When you see that, it recalls the conventional wisdom you always hear about our business climate being bad for manufacturing. But is that true?

Raising Arts Ticket Prices Vs. Raising Higher Ed Tuition

So this guy thinks that arts organizations should lower ticket prices and rely more on fundraising:

If we want to keep, not to mention rebuild, our audiences, we need to rethink our ticket prices and to find other ways to balance our budgets. ..we need to work actively and aggressively to increase fund raising revenue (by producing exciting work and marketing that work well) and use a portion of this revenue to lower ticket prices.

I’m not actually sure that lower fundraising revenue is due to not producing exciting enough work or marketing it well enough, but let’s put that aside for a moment, because there’s an interesting analogy to what’s going on in higher education in our state (and others). 

Back to the Future

As we enter the new year are going back in time?  The New York Times has an interesting metric feature about our country’s trade deficit.  The interactive feature lists port cities’ exports and imports. Seattle, being a port city of some note itself, is listed. Only three ports have a trade surplus. They are Detroit, Miami and Pembina, North Dakota.*  All the rest of the ports import more than they export. Of course, Seattle area exports and imports aren’t confined to our ports.  We export lots of software but for U.S. government statistical purposes software is considered a service and so doesn’t show up in the trade statistics you ordinarily see. 

The Great Lightbulb Change-out of 2009, Part 2

As promised, I’ve been doing some research on how local jurisdictions are using their Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant dollars. We’ve collected info from 30 of the 41 jurisdictions so far, and the results are very interesting. A wide variety of projects, with about two-thirds of the money going to 1) lighting, HVAC and window upgrades to municipal buildings, public facilities and streetlights; 2) loan, grants & loan loss reserves for residential & commercial retrofits; 3) energy audits to help identify the work for #2; and 4) weatherization of low-income housing.

Check out the list of projects here and the breakdown by category here.