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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.

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.

Is it possible that manufacturing data in the US is running counter to the rest of the world's major economies, and it is in the US that we are seeing positive data? Well, manufacturing activity is down in China. And it is down in Europe and much of Asia as well. In this Wall Street Journal video, Dow Jones editors Nick Hastings and Martin Essex discuss the potential impact the bad manufacturing data will have on the global economy:

On his Econoblog, The Street Light , economic consultant Kash Mansori takes a look at what is behind the recent strong performance of the US manufacturing sector . He points to the production of business equipment as the primary factor: Mansori: The reason for this strong growth in the production of business equipment is something that I think has largely been overlooked: business did actually begin spending on investment goods in 2010. Much of this was simply catching up from the extreme slowdown in spending on equipment in 2008 and 2009, but nevertheless, in 2010 it was definitely true that business spending on equipment and software grew at a very healthy rate. Note that this matches my personal (i.e. anectdotal) experience over the past 12 months; senior management of the companies I meet with almost universally tell me that the purse strings have finally loosened, and their companies are beginning to make major purchases and investments that had been put off. Read What's Driving US Manufacturing Growth here . ( H/t Mark Thoma )

Peter Cappelli , professor of Management at The Wharton School , says Americans have a tendency to accept unemployment rates as "normal" when they stay at the same level for a while. In the 90s, for example, 4% became the accepted norm. The "new normal" was 8% in 1981. And now, we may be resigning ourselves to the idea that 9-10% is normal. What is different now, Cappelli says, is there are more people who believe that "there is nothing that can be done" about high unemployment. Here is Cappelli speaking about the current debate over what to do about unemployment today in a Knowledge@Wharton interview: