Vermont Futures Project: Vermont Economic Indicators and Dashboard.

http://www.vtfuturesproject.org/vermont-economic-snapshot/ Statistical data compendium website with narrative. Prepared on Behalf of the Vermont Futures Foundation

Using secondary data sources to identify industrial synergies among Precision Manufacturing firms in the Pioneer Valley

The purpose of this memo is to report the findings from an exploratory analysis of trade and occupational relationships among businesses in the Pioneer Valley’s Precision Manufacturing sector. The motivation for this work is the interest among economic development professionals in developing an information system that can identify local companies with common interest and needs by examining underlying commonalities in their workforce skills, technological foundations, markets and other types of complimentary attributes. These commonalities may then serve as a common platform upon which to build future inter-firm partnerships. One possible application for this information system is to design more effectively targeted business networking events. Another possible application is to produce lists of businesses that might benefit from participation in targeted support initiatives: such as new workforce training opportunities, technical assistance programs, or upcoming grant opportunities. Most data source group similar companies based upon their primary product or service. However, many new market opportunities and innovations arise from the cross-fertilization of ideas among firms that may make different things, yet share other common characteristics. Research into inter-firm collaborations, networks, and cluster-based economic development emphasize common production technologies, trade (buyer-supplier) associations, and workforce skills as likely sources of complementary activities. Furthermore, local companies that offer similar products or services often belong to the same trade association and may already be aware of one another, reducing the need for an information system to help bring these companies together. Similarities among firms in different industries are often not as immediately apparent. Armed with a database that matches firms based upon key characteristics, economic developers can more effectively fulfill their role as information brokers and network facilitators – improving the likelihood of bringing the right people together at the right time. Collecting this kind of information through surveys and interviews can be extremely time consuming, costly, and may be viewed as overly obtrusive by some businesses. There are publicly available data sources that, while imperfect, may reduce the burden of compiling this information. In April of 2009, Dr. Renski volunteered to conduct a preliminary analysis to assess whether publicly available datasets could beused identify potential opportunities for fruitful collaborations among businesses. This memo reports the findings from my investigation

A Profile of Advanced Manufacturing in the Boston/MetroWest Region:Key Industry and Occupational Trends

This report provides a detailed examination of Advanced Manufacturing in the Boston/MetroWest region. It is part of an eight-part series, each focusing on different areas of the Commonwealth. It examines recent employment and earnings trends; analyzes key occupations in Advanced Manufacturing’s subsectors, looking for common labor needs and comparing wages to similar workers in other industries; identifies the most common and critical skills needed by employers; and offers a detailed demographic profile of Advanced Manufacturing to highlight areas of critical concern for the future health of the industry. With nearly 50,000 workers and over 1,000 businesses, the Boston/MetroWest region’s Advanced Manufacturing sector is the second largest in the state. Yet, Advanced Manufacturing represents only a relatively small portion of the regional economy. Advanced Manufacturing in the Boston/MetroWest region is clear- ly dominated by the Computers and Electronics subsector, which alone accounts for nearly half of all Ad- vanced Manufacturing employment and pays the highest wages of any subsector in any region of the state. However, Computers and Electronics has also experienced the most dramatic job losses of late. Since 2001, the region’s Advanced Manufacturing sector has shed nearly 30,000 jobs. Roughly two-thirds of these were in Computers and Electronics. The Fabricated Metals and Machinery, Paper and Printing and Medical Equipment and Supplies subsectors also witnessed pretty substantial declines. Yet employment in all of these areas has stabilized in the years following the Great Recession of 2008/09. Chemicals and Plastics and Food Processing and Production have actually added jobs since 2001. In general, Advanced Manufacturing subsectors in the Boston/MetroWest region pay higher wages than elsewhere in the Commonwealth. While partly due to the region’s higher cost of living, it also reflects the higher knowledge and post-secondary educational requirements of employers. Advanced Manufacturing in the Boston/MetroWest region specializes in more R&D intensive and high value-added modes of production. This is clearly reflected in its regional labor pool, which contains more workers in occupations requir- ing high levels of scientific, engineering, complex reasoning and technical skills compared to other regions. The Advanced Manufacturing workforce of the Boston/MetroWest region trends slightly younger than the rest of the state. Nevertheless, we still anticipate that the region will soon be facing a massive wave of retirements in Advanced Manufacturing and should being planning accordingly with more outreach programs designed to attract youth, women, minorities and other types of non-traditional manufacturing workers to the industry

Evaluating Gross vs. Net Migration Rates In a County-Level Component Model of Population Change

This paper evaluates the accuracy of county-level population estimates and forecasts under three different methods for estimating the domestic migration in a components-of-change framework. The first is a net-migration approach similar to that used by the U.S. Census Bureau and by many state data centers. While common, the net migration assumption has been widely criticized for not accurately reflecting the population ‘at risk’ of migrating into a county. The other two methods follow a gross migration approach whereby in- and out-migration are added separately into the population change equation. The simple gross migration approach estimates domestic in-migration to each county from the rest of the nation as a whole. The multiregional gross migration model examines flows between specific pairs of counties and adds these together to measure total in-migration. Otherwise, the population estimates models are identical – allowing us to isolate differences in population estimates due solely to how the domestic migration component is estimated. We evaluate the accuracy of the three migration approaches against the county household population counts of the 2010 Decennial Census using a variety of common measures of predictive accuracy. We find that the simple gross migration model typically produces the smallest forecast errors. However, this is followed closely by the net migration approach, whose average forecast errors exceed the simple gross model by only .2 percentage points. Despite its far greater complexity the multiregional model produces the highest average errors of all three approaches with an average absolute error .7 percentage points higher than the net migration model. This is due largely to a higher proportion of extreme errors —counties where the model produces an average in excess of five or ten percent greater than the actual census counts. We suspect that this is due to measurement error in the Internal Revenue Service migration data, which may be more influential when calculated for specific pairs of counties but has less noticeable impact when distributed across the entire nation (i.e. the simple gross migration approach) or when in and out-migration are subtracted from one another (i.e. the net migration approach). Although producing higher errors when averaged over all counties, the multiregional model still produces the lowest errors for the greatest number of counties. All three models produce their most reliable estimates for large counties and the greatest error for the smallest counties—places where even small differences can greatly influence year to year changes in migration rates. The simple gross migration approach is generally preferred among mid-sized and larger counties. The multiregional model is typically favored among counties with fewer than 20,000 persons. Counties experiencing rapid decline or growth are also notoriously difficult to estimate, regardless of method. Rapidly growing counties tend to be overestimated, most notably so in the case of the multiregional model which has a natural upward bias to begin with. However, the multiregional model tends to do a little better than the others at estimating population in cases of recent decline. The simple gross migration model is generally preferred for rapidly growing counties. The key exception is among fast growing small counties, which are favored by a multiregional approach. This project was funded by: The United States Census Bureau For Services in Support of the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 Estimates Evaluation Work Order: YA132310SE038

A Profile of Advanced Manufacturing in the Southeast Region: Key Industry and Occupational Trends

This report provides a detailed examination of Advanced Manufacturing in the Southeast region. This re-port is part of an eight-part series, each focusing on different areas of the Commonwealth. It examines recent employment and earnings trends; analyzes key occupations in Advanced Manufacturing’s subsectors, looking for common labor needs and comparing wages to similar workers in other industries; identifies the most common and critical skills needed by employers; and offers a detailed demographic profile of Advanced Manufacturing to highlight areas of critical concern for the future health of the industry. With nearly 30,000 workers and over 1,000 businesses, the Southeast region’s Advanced Manufacturing sector is the third largest in the state. However, it represents only a modest share of the total regional economy. Unlike most other regions, Advanced Manufacturing in the Southeast is not dominated by any single subsector. The largest subsectors are Fabricated Metals and Equipment, Computers and Electronics and Food Processing. However, its primary regional specialization is in Medical Equipment and Supplies manufacturing, where the region’s employment share in this sector is more than three times the nation’s. Earnings in the Southeast also tend to lag most other regions in the Commonwealth. The major exception is the region’s Medical Equipment and Supplies subsector, where wages exceed both the state and the nation. But while not as high as found elsewhere, workers in the region’s Advanced Manufacturing sector still surpass those of most other jobs in the region. Advanced Manufacturing in the Southeast experienced decades of consistent layoffs and business closures. Since 2001, Advanced Manufacturing lost a net 11,000 jobs—nearly a third its total jobs base. But the regional impact of these losses were blunted by the relative small size of the region’s Advanced Manufacturing sector. Nearly half of these layoffs were in the Computers and Electronics subsector—but only the Food Processing sector actually added net jobs over the past 11 years. And while job losses have abated following the 2008 recession, Advanced Manufacturing in the region has not kept pace with national trends of net job creation. The aging of the Advanced Manufacturing workforce poses a major challenge to the region in the years ahead. More than 27% of today’s workforce will reach retirement age within the next ten years—a larger share than either the nation or the state. But with proper training and outreach, these retirements may create opportunities for young workers and others having a hard time finding a path to well-paying jobs in the modern economy. We also find considerable overlap in skill requirements across the varied Advanced Manufacturing subsectors in the region, suggesting ample opportunities for targeted training programs that meet the needs of a variety of employers

A Profile of Advanced Manufacturing in the Cape and Islands Region: Key Industry and Occupational Trends

This report provides a detailed examination of Advanced Manufacturing in the Cape and Islands region. This report is part of an eight-part series, each focusing on different areas of the Commonwealth. It examines recent employment and earnings trends; analyzes key occupations in Advanced Manufacturing’s sub-sectors, looking for common labor needs and comparing wages to similar workers in other industries; identifies the most common and critical skills needed by employers; and offers a detailed demographic profile of Advanced Manufacturing to highlight areas of critical concern for the future health of the industry. The Advanced Manufacturing sector has an almost negligible presence in the Cape and Islands. Its fewer than 2,000 workers comprise less than 2% of the total regional employment base. The largest subsectors are Computers and Electronics and Food Processing, but no subsector constitutes a clear regional specialization. Advanced Manufacturing workers in the region also tend to make less than their counterparts else-where in the state. Only workers in Computers and Electronics earn substantially more than the regional average, and most subsectors have witnessed little real wage growth since 2001. Like most other regions, the Advanced Manufacturing sector in the Cape and Islands has witnessed net job losses and layoffs since 2001. However, due the sectors limited presence in the region the relative impact of these loses has been rather muted compared to other areas. Most of the major losses were associated with recessionary periods in 2001-02 and 2008-09. Since 2010, the Advanced Manufacturing sector has added net new jobs to the regional economy at a pace commensurate with national sectoral growth, although the actual number of jobs is still small. The limited size of the core Advanced Manufacturing labor pool and the irregular geography of the region challenges the cost-effective development of training programs that typically benefit from scale advantages and concentrated demand. While workers across the different subsector share many key occupations and skill requirements, workforce development officials may have to develop programs that appeal to a wider spectrum of industries. The aging of the Advanced Manufacturing workforce also poses a major challenge to the region. The labor force of the Cape and Islands is among the oldest in the state. Almost 60% of to-day’s workforce will reach retirement age within the next twenty years—and there are few workers in their twenties and thirties to fill these openings. On the plus side, the Advanced Manufacturing workforce in the Cape and Islands is more diverse in its gender and racial composition that what we typically find elsewhere in the state and region

A Profile of Advanced Manufacturing in the Pioneer Valley Region: Key Industry and Occupational Trends

This report provides a detailed examination of Advanced Manufacturing in the Pioneer Valley. This report is part of an eight-part series, each focusing on different areas of the Commonwealth. It examines recent employment and earnings trends; analyzes key occupations in Advanced Manufacturing’s subsectors, looking for common labor needs and comparing wages to similar workers in other industries; identifies the most common and critical skills needed by employers; and offers a detailed demographic profile of Advanced Manufacturing to highlight areas of critical concern for the future health of the industry. With over 600 businesses and 22,000 employers, Advanced Manufacturing accounts for nearly eight per-cent of the Pioneer Valley’s total employment base in 2012. The region’s Advanced Manufacturing sector is dominated by Fabricated Metals and Machinery, which alone accounts for nearly half of sector’s establishments and employment. The region also has significant industrial specializations in Chemicals and Plastics and Paper and Printing. Earnings in the Pioneer Valley tend to be lower than statewide averages in most subsectors—although they all exceed the overall wage levels for the region. The Pioneer Valley’s Advanced Manufacturing sector has suffered from layoffs and business closures over the past several decades. Since 2001, the Pioneer Valley’s Advanced Manufacturing sector lost nearly 8,000 jobs—roughly a quarter of all Advanced Manufacturing employment in the region. While certainly a blow to the region’s economy, the Pioneer Valley actually fared somewhat better than most other regions during this time. Furthermore, there are signs of recovering in the years following the Great Recession of 2008/09. The Advanced Manufacturing sector has post net job growth each year since 2010, with the regionally dominant Fabricated Metals and Machining subsector posting particularly noteworthy growth that closely matches expansion at the national level. The aging of the Advanced Manufacturing workforce poses a major challenge to the Pioneer Valley in the years ahead. More than a quarter of today’s workforce will reach retirement age within the next ten years—a larger share than either the nation or the state. But with proper training and outreach, these retirements may create opportunities for young workers, women, and others having a hard time finding a path to well-paying jobs in the modern economy. We also find considerable overlap in skill requirements across the varied Advanced Manufacturing subsectors in the region, suggesting ample opportunities for targeted training programs that meet the needs of a variety of employers

A Profile of Advanced Manufacturing in the Northeast Region: Key Industry and Occupational Trends

This report provides a detailed examination of Advanced Manufacturing in the Northeast region. This re-port is part of an eight-part series, each focusing on different areas of the Commonwealth. It examines re-cent employment and earnings trends; analyzes key occupations in Advanced Manufacturing’s subsectors, looking for common labor needs and comparing wages to similar workers in other industries; identifies the most common and critical skills needed by employers; and offers a detailed demographic profile of Advanced Manufacturing to highlight areas of critical concern for the future health of the industry. More people in the Northeast work in Advanced Manufacturing than in any other region. The region’s nearly 65,000 workers account for nearly a third of all Advanced Manufacturing employment in the Commonwealth. Annual earnings top $89,000 per worker—greatly exceeding the state average as well as most other major industry sectors in the Northeast. The depth of the Advanced Manufacturing sector in the region is reflected in a labor pool which is both deep and broad, with a wide spectrum of workers to draw from of various skill and education levels. In particular, there is a core group of workers that support re-search and innovative activities in addition to those more focused on production and operations. The Northeast region is dominated by the Computer and Electronics products subsector. Its 370 individual business establishments employ more than 26,000 workers, accounting for over 41$115,000 per year with robust real wage growth over the past decade However, the region’s dependence on Computers and Electronics is also a liability. The subsector has shed a net 21,000 jobs since 2001—the largest total loss of any subsector in any region of the state and 60 percent of all job losses in the region’s Advanced Manufactuing sector during this period. The Advanced Manufacturing workforce in the Northeast is one of the most highly educated and experienced in the state. But like most other areas, the Northeast region may also soon be facing an acute labor shortage if action is not taken in the near future. The typical Advanced Manufacturing worker is currently 45 years old, and within the next ten years roughly 20 percent of the region’s Advanced Manufacturing workforce will approach or enter the traditional retirement age. There are presently few younger workers in the pipeline to replace the impeding retirees. But with proper training and outreach, these anticipated retirements may also create opportunities for young workers and others having a hard time finding a path to well-paying jobs in the modern economy