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Researchers in the Brooking Institution 's Metropolitan Policy Program have put out a new paper calling on the federal government to "initiate a short-term competitive Regional Export Accelerator Challenge (REACH) grant program." They argue that too many U.S. cities are too slow to engage in the global marketplace. From the paper: Despite the size and growth of foreign consumer demand, too many firms and too many parts of the United States remain domestically-oriented, thereby missing out on opportunities to innovate and expand. In addition, the national export service delivery system is too Washington-centric and does not embrace federalism’s opportunities to work directly with leaders in regions, and their state partners, to globalize traditional economic development strategies. The key problem is that both individual firms and entire regions under-export. -Too few firms are exporting and exporting regularly. As of 2010, less than 1 percent of U.S. firms sell a product abroad, a much lower share than in other countries, including major trading partners such as Canada, Germany, and Korea. While the number of new exporting firms continues to grow (with 16,500 firms beginning to export between 2009 and 2010), that pace is slower than the creation of all new firms, keeping the overall percentage of exporting firms low. As of 2010, the United States has 293,000 exporters. However, only 188,000 firms exported in both 2009 and 2010, suggesting that approximately one-third of exporters may be “accidental exporters” that react to one-time demand from international buyers rather than integrating exports into their long-term sales and marketing strategy. -The nation itself remains a patchwork of exporting activity. The share of the U.S. economy that is driven by exports is relatively small, at 14 percent. But even at that level, 74 percent of metro areas—and 86 of the 100 largest metro economies—underperform the national rate. Metro areas as large and diverse as Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, Miami, New York, and San Antonio all generate less than 8 percent of their economic output through exports, placing them in the bottom quarter of performers among the largest 100 metro economies. Read the paper here . Amy Liu , co-director of the Metropolitan Policy Program, discusses the need for domestic firms to expand exports in this interview:

Charles Fishman writes In The Atlantic , writes about General Electric moving some manufacturing operations back to the U.S. It seems a bit of a stretch to say this is part of an "Insourcing Boom," as the article is titled, but the economic conditions that have led GE to manufacturing high end refrigerators and water heaters at Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky are important to note. Fishman: GE’s appliance unit does $5 billion in business—and today, 55 percent of that revenue comes from products made in the United States. By the end of 2014, GE expects 75 percent of the appliance business’s revenue to come from American-made products like dishwashers, water heaters, and refrigerators, and the company expects that its sales numbers will be larger, as the housing market revives. What’s happening in factories across the U.S. is not simply a reversal of decades of outsourcing. If there was once a rush to push factories of nearly every kind offshore, their return is more careful; many things are never coming back. Levi Strauss used to have more than 60 domestic blue-jeans plants; today it contracts out work to 16 and owns none, and it’s hard to imagine mass-market clothing factories ever coming back in significant numbers—the work is too basic. Appliance Park once used its thousands of workers to make almost every part of every appliance; today, every component GE decides to make in Louisville returns home only after a careful calculation that balances quality, cost, skills, and speed. Appliance Park wants to make its own dishwasher racks, because it can, and because the rack is an important part of the dishwasher experience for customers. But Appliance Park will likely never again make its own compressors or motors, nor is it going to build a microchip-etching facility. And of course, manufacturing employment will never again be as central to the U.S. economy as it was in the 1960s and ’70s—improvements in worker productivity alone ensure that. Back in the ’60s, Appliance Park was turning out 250,000 appliances a month. The assembly lines there today are turning out almost as many—with at most one-third of the workers. Read The Insourcing Boom here.

Brookings has a new interactive feature on manufacturing in America. The interactive graphics paint a fairly clear picture of the ups and downs of manufacturing jobs across the country. And the producers also make the case for manufacturing jobs remaining vital to a growing economy, even in this digital age. For one, they pay better. But manufacturers also drive innovation. From the report. Manufacturing firms are far more likely than non-manufacturing firms to introduce new products and new production or business processes. The most innovative manufacturing industries relate to computers, communications, and pharmaceuticals. Manufacturing makes up about 11 percent of U.S. GDP, but accounts for more than two-thirds (68 percent) of U.S. domestic company R&D spending-a key input to innovation Engineers are an essential input into technological innovation and they are disproportionately concentrated in manufacturing. Furthermore labor productivity growth-a broad measure of innovation-is higher in manufacturing than in the private sector as a whole. Below is a glimpse of what the interactive feature looks like. Click here to go to the site.

Durable good orders dropped 4% in January, the Commerce Department reports. That translates to $8.6 billion of orders less than in December. It is the biggest monthly drop in three years. It helps that the last three months saw durable good orders climb enough that this drop doesn't seem as ominous as the big drop in January 2009. Still, this is not the kind of news that suggests the recovery will speed up anytime soon. The good news in the report: shipments continued to go up: Shipments of manufactured durable goods in January, up two consecutive months, increased $0.8 billion or 0.4 percent to $207.8 billion. This followed a 1.9 percent December increase. Transportation equipment, also up two consecutive months, had the largest increase, $2.6 billion or 5.4 percent to $50.3 billion. This followed a 1.0 percent December increase. Meanwhile, orders for capital goods went down: Nondefense new orders for capital goods in January decreased $5.4 billion or 6.3 percent to $79.5 billion. Shipments decreased $0.6 billion or 0.9 percent to $70.9 billion. Unfilled orders increased $8.6 billion or 1.6 percent to $554.4 billion. Inventories increased $1.7 billion or 1.0 percent to $172.0 billion. Read the Census Department report here .

Add Boston Consulting Group's Hal Sirkin to the list of industry experts who believe that reports of the death of US manufacturing have been, as Twain might put it, "an exaggeration." With the decline of the dollar and the rise of wages in China, "It's now becoming more effective to produce in the U.S. than it is to produce in a lot of different countries," says Sirkin. Sirkin recently discussed the state of manufacturing in the US with the Knowledge@Wharton editor in chief Mukul Pandya .

This Global Ethics Corner from the Carnegie Council does a nice job of laying out the core questions we should be asking about the bipartisan push in Washington for a revival of manufacturing in the U.S.: "Is the rebirth of America's manufacturing industry necessarily a good thing?" This, and the other questions raised in the slide-show about factories and innovation, should be good conversation starters for a class discussion on the role of manufacturing in the U.S. economy today.

Here is a new video from the World Economic Forum on the future of manufacturing. While it comes across as a bit earnest in parts, we are sharing it here because it does a nice job of explaining how manufacturing--"advanced manufacturing" in particular--drives global economic growth. What is your take? Do policymakers need to work harder to drive advanced manufacturing in their economies? Can developed economies like the US compete with the new manufacturing juggernauts like Brazil and China?