Perspective

Why do metropolitan areas need to ensure that their universities, corporations, and independent laboratories conduct abundant, top-flight research and development? Why would Southern Nevada do well to build up its research capability, particularly in the sciences and engineering? The answer has to do with what has increasingly emerged as an unavoidable syllogism of economic competitiveness. To put it simply: Prosperity depends on productivity; productivity depends heavily on innovation, and innovation depends heavily on research and development. The bottom line: A region thin on R&D is not likely to be innovative, and if it is not innovative, it will probably not flourish

Export west: How Mountain West metros can lead national export growth and boost competitiveness

In the beginning of 2010, with U.S. output growth modest and job growth nonexistent, President Obama devoted a portion of his State of the Union Address to “fi xing the problems that are hampering our growth.” One of these problems, according to the president, was a lack of international export sales. The president linked an increase in exports to an increase in jobs, and pledged to double the nation’s exports over the next five years.2 Since then, export growth has emerged as a key tenet of numerous economic visions including those of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution which has suggested that the “next economy” in the West and nationally will likely be “export-oriented, lower-carbon, and innovation-driven.”3 This report focuses attention on the benefits of exporting and highlights the existing and emerging strengths—and some weaknesses—of the Intermountain West’s large metropolitan areas in global trade. Doubling exports, whether or not it happens in the next fi ve years, would be a major boon to the Intermountain West’s largest metropolitan areas. Such a doubling would bring the West’s large metros thousands of good jobs and see them expand on their existing strengths in the world economy. The prospect of such gains is especially attractive in the Mountain zone, moreover, given the present moment of self-refl ection in a region that appears faced with the partial breakdown of its traditional migration- and real estate-driven growth machine. With such sources of domestically-driven growth looking less reliable, export-based development holds out one possible new source of sustainable job-creation and broadly shared prosperity. International exports, after all, present an important opportunity for the Mountain metros and promise tremendous benefi ts to workers, companies, regions, and the nation as a whole. Export markets in Brazil, India, and China are growing rapidly at a time of slower projected domestic growth. Export-related jobs pay relatively well. And for metropolitan area industry clusters and firms, international engagement and competition brings its own benefits of heightened innovation and productivity growth. In this respect, it is a good thing that metropolitan areas in the Mountain West already have depth in a variety of export industries, and in some cases enjoy high rates of industrial innovation—both a result of firms’ engagement in international competition and a driver of further global competitiveness itself. All in all, numerous metropolitan areas in the Mountain West could be well-positioned to benefit from the current national focus on doubling exports and from targeted metropolitan efforts to expand the foreign markets for their goods and services. To take advantage of their global connections and the new federal focus on exports, however, the region’s metropolitan areas-particularly those that have been heavily oriented to population growth and real estate development—will have to rethink what they do and how they do it. They will have to look outward. They will have to be more innovative, both in determining what new products and services they develop and in retooling their existing activities to capture a larger share of global demand. And they will need to be deliberate and strategic in their efforts. In sum, while bolstering exports will not replace the thousands of jobs lost to the Great Recession—many of them real estate and locally-serving jobs that disappeared once migration and consumption slowed down—the export of goods and services is likely to be an important source of quality and sustainable job growth for the region in the future. Western leaders should at a minimum investigate that possibility and consider the data and information presented in the following pages

Power America\u27s — and Nevada\u27s — Advanced Industries: State by State, Region by Region

With the U.S. economy still flat, economic experts and leaders continue to search for the next source of U.S. and regional growth. One key component of the next era of prosperity can be projected: It is what the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program calls the advanced industry (AI) sector. The nation’s most strategic R&D — and STEM worker intensive industries, AIs like aerospace and IT are prime movers of regional and national prosperity, because they are key sources of technology innovation and generate domestic and international exports. Accordingly, the AI swatch of 50 discrete industries has emerged as an important new topic in economic discussions. In keeping with that, this lecture will introduce and describe the AI sector, review its strategic importance for states and regions, and consider the kinds of public strategies that can expand it. Along with national data, the talk will describe the AI sector in Southern Nevada and consider potential development strategies for the region

Mountain Monitor-4th Quarter 2012

Indicators of economic recovery depicted continued progress in the major metropolitan areas of the Mountain West in the fourth quarter of 2012. The region’s employment recovery gained momentum, and solid home-price increases in the region contributed to the nation‘s broader housing recovery. Such inroads bode well for further advances in 2013. At the same time, the region’s output recovery slowed and unemployment refused to budge

Mountain Monitor - 3rd Quarter 2013

The quarter’s Mountain Monitor marks the four-year anniversary of Brookings Mountain West\u27s quarterly tracking of the uneven pace of recovery across the major metro areas of the Intermountain West and it finds that, although the region continues to outperform the national economy the rate of recovery slowed moderately in the region’s metro areas. As a group, Mountain region metro areas advanced on all four indicators of economic recovery tracked by the Monitor—employment, output, unemployment, and house prices—but their progress was more restrained in the third quarter of 2013 than it was in the second. Beneath the regional headline of moderating growth, however, a number of noteworthy developments from individual metro areas stand out. In sum, the region appeared to remain split at the close of the third quarter between those metro areas where the legacy of the Great Recession is fading steadily, such as Denver, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City, and places such as Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, and Tucson that were still struggling to regain their footing after a brutal once-in-a-generation economic shock

Mountain Monitor-2nd Quarter 2012

Data for the second quarter of 2012 reveal that the large metropolitan areas of the Mountain region were undergoing some of both the strongest and weakest economic recoveries in the nation—even as the pace of recovery across the region as a whole slackened. The result is a new geography. Crash-blasted Boise and Phoenix, along with Utah’s metropolitan areas, are now recovering relatively strongly while Colorado’s metropolitan areas and Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and Tucson struggle

Mountain Monitor - 2nd Quarter 2013

Economic recovery progressed steadily across the metropolitan Mountain West in the second quarter of 2013. Many of the region’s major metro areas counted among the strongest economic performers nationally, but output growth slowed over the quarter and the region‘s unemployment recovery looked to be stagnating. Moderate job growth and a fast and accelerating housing recovery buoyed the Mountain West economy in the second quarter

Mountain Monitor-3rd Quarter 2011

Economic recovery in the Intermountain West’s major metropolitan areas edged forward in the third quarter of 2011, after idling for much of the year. Nationally, high technology and automotive-oriented metros showed the strongest signs of recovery; in the Intermountain West, manufacturing-intensive and technology-oriented metros had the strongest quarter. Employment and output grew in most metropolitan areas, and the unemployment rate fell throughout the region. At the same time, the housing market freefall came to an end—or at least paused—across most of the region, as home prices ticked upwards for the first time since the Monitor began tracking recession and recovery. Finally, the clear split in the economic data between housing-bust metros and the previously more-resilient economies on the northern and eastern edges of the region seems to be breaking down in the region

Mountain Monitor-2nd Quarter 2011

Data through the second quarter of 2011 raise new questions about the pace and certainty of recovery in the Intermountain West. Even places like Denver, Colorado Springs, and Ogden—which only suffered mild setbacks in the early quarters of the recession—have stagnated in the wake of the nation’s worst economic slump since the Great Depression. Output and employment increased hesitantly in eight of the 10 major metros of the Intermountain West in the second quarter while the housing market slumped to new lows everywhere

Centers of invention: Leveraging the Mountain West innovation complex for energy system transformation

America needs to transform its energy system to reduce its carbon intensity and make clean energy cheap. At the same time, the Intermountain West region (which includes Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah) possesses a unique confluence of world-class innovation assets; varied energy resources; and unparalleled opportunities to build out next-generation energy systems. To that end, the brief proposes that the federal government begin constructing a distributed Intermountain West network of federally-funded, commercialization-oriented, broadly collaborative energy research and innovation centers. Organized around existing capacities in a hub-spoke structure that links fundamental science with innovation and commercialization, these research centers would engage universities, industries and labs to work around specific energy themes to rapidly deploy new technologies to the marketplace, build the region’s knowledge-base, and stimulate economic development. Selected competitively based on scientific merit and the strength of proposed management, financial, and commercialization plans, roughly four to six energy innovation centers could reasonably be organized in the Intermountain West with total annual funding between $1 billion and$2 billion