Nobel laureate Michael Spence, author of The Next Convergence, has looked at which American companies created jobs at home from 1990 to 2008, a period of extreme globalization. The results are startling.
The companies that did business in global markets, including manufacturers, banks, exporters, energy firms and financial services, contributed almost nothing to overall American job growth. The firms that did contribute were those operating mostly in the U.S. market, immune to global competition — health care companies, government agencies, retailers and hotels. Sadly, jobs in these sectors are lower paid and lower skilled than those that were outsourced. "When I first looked at the data, I was kind of stunned," says Spence, who now advocates a German-style industrial policy to keep jobs in some high-value sectors at home. Clearly, it's a myth that businesses are simply waiting for more economic and regulatory "certainty" to invest back home.
What U.S. Economic Recovery? Five Destructive Myths - TIME
