Trends in rural manufacturing

Manufactures ; Rural areas ; Rural development

What do expected changes in U.S. job structure mean for states and workers in the Tenth District?

Public interest in the future structure of the U.S. labor market has been understandably high in recent years, for several reasons. Some types of manufacturing and service jobs are going offshore. The recovery in employment from the 2001 recession has been sluggish. And the quality of job creation has been called into question. Against this backdrop, policymakers, businesses, workers, and students in the Tenth Federal Reserve District are asking difficult questions about the future of jobs in their area. Will local industries increase or decrease employment in the years ahead? What types of workers will be in highest demand? Are future jobs in the area likely to be high paying? Wilkerson looks at the potential impact of expected changes in U.S. job structure on employment in the Tenth District. Specifically, he analyzes the latest national industrial and occupational employment projections made by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and discusses what the projections mean for states and workers in the region—both in terms of quantity and quality of job growth through 2012. He draws two primary conclusions from the data. First, except in Colorado, the current industrial structures of Tenth District states are less favorable for future job growth than in the nation, although in some cases only slightly so. Second, the prospects for high-quality job growth in several district states may be somewhat lower than in the nation. While high paying jobs are projected to grow faster than low paying jobs across the district, the industrial structures of Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming are not quite as conducive to growth in high paying jobs as in the country as a whole.Employment ; Labor market ; Federal Reserve District, 10th ; Job analysis

How high tech is the Tenth District?

Newspapers in the Tenth Federal Reserve District generally keep a close eye on where their cities rank in national studies of high-tech activity. Readers have good reason to be interested in how “high tech” their communities are, despite the recent downturn in the sector. High-tech workers are among the best paid of all workers and, if these recent studies are correct, an area’s failure to embrace the “New Economy” could result in a lower standard of living and fewer opportunities for residents down the road. But studies of high-tech cities, which are usually produced by think tanks, trade groups, or business magazines, have varying results and usually focus only on major metropolitan areas. As a result, it is often difficult for policymakers, businesses, and residents in the Tenth District to understand where they really stand in the “New Economy” and how they got there.> Wilkerson shows that much of the Tenth District is quite high tech, once the geographic distribution of the region’s population is taken into account. Across the country, the overarching determinant for the amount of local high-tech activity appears to be a metro’s size. Because the Tenth District has relatively few large cities, the level of high-tech activity in most district states falls short of the national average. But analysis of high-tech activity in metro areas shows that nearly all of the district’s larger metros exceed national averages for cities their size. In fact, several of the region’s larger cities rank among the most high-tech places in the nation.Technology ; Federal Reserve District, 10th

Recession and recovery across the nation: lessons from history

The U.S. economy officially fell into recession in December 2007, but the timing of the downturn varied widely across regions of the country. In some regions, employment began to erode much earlier in 2007, while in other regions economic activity stayed strong well into the second half of 2008. Do regions typically vary this much in the timing and circumstances of their recessions? If so, perhaps past experience can also shed light on whether some regions can be expected to rebound earlier or stronger than others from this recession. ; To explore these possibilities, Wilkerson looks at job growth trends across the 12 districts of the Federal Reserve System in recent business cycles. He finds that the timing and depth of regional recessions typically vary widely, with several districts regularly outperforming others. The same generally holds true for the timing and strength of economic recoveries and expansions across the country. Some of these differences can be explained by the unique industrial structures of the districts, but other factors also play a role.

Progress of research on water vapor lidar

Research is described on several aspects of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) of 532 nm laser light in H2, D2, and CH4. The goals of this work are to develop a more thorough understanding of nonlinear processes involving the Raman effect and four-wave mixing, and to find the best way to generate radiation at several wavelengths simultaneously, for lidar applications. Issues addressed are conversion efficiency, optimization of operating conditions (gas pressure, confocal parameter, etc.) and the distribution of output pulse energy over three Stokes components, the first anti-Stokes component, and the zeroth order (pump) wavelength. The described research and results constitute another step in the development of SRS applications for NASA's atmospheric lidar program