Helping small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic is critical to ensuring a strong economic recovery. Since the start of the pandemic, small businesses have had to navigate a multitude of challenges including public health regulations, reduced demand for some products and services, and...

In prior work (Hill et. al., 2012), we examined the ability of regional economies to bounce back after experiencing an exogenous economic shock. In this paper, we build on our earlier work to examine a different type of region: metropolitan areas that have endured chronic low levels of growth...

Innovation drives America’s economic growth and ultimately determines its living standards andthose of its metropolitan areas. However, the nation faces a growing innovation challenge in today’sglobal economy. To respond, the federal government should establish a National...

Manufacturing matters to the United States because it provides high-wage jobs, commercial innovation (the nation’s largest source), a key to trade deficit reduction, and a disproportionately large contribution to environmental sustainability. The manufacturing industries and firms that make...

Analysis of data on employment, earnings, and the number of business establishments engaged in U.S. manufacturing finds that:In Metropolitan areas, especially large metropolitan areas and central metropolitan counties, contain the great majority of manufacturing jobs and nearly all very...

This report and its accompanying interactive map show the vulnerability of every U.S. neighborhood to the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Using data from the American Community Survey, they show that:• High-Poverty Communities Are the Most Economically Vulnerable. About 78 percent of...

This policy brief argues for a renewed emphasis on comprehensive community development strategies as a means of combating concentrated poverty. It discusses five elements that such strategies should include: (1) combining people- and place-based efforts; (2) ensuring that strategies reflect...

America’s low-wage workers have fared poorly during the past two decades. Since the late 1970s, the wages of workers at the tenth percentile of the wage distribution have declined in both absolute terms (adjusting for inflation) and relative to those of middle- and high-wage workers. This...

An analysis of employment and wage data for 114 metropolitan areas that specialized in manufacturing in 1980 and lost manufacturing jobs from 1980 to 2005 finds that:Two-thirds (76) of the 114 metropolitan areas, mostly in the Midwest, performed worse than the nation as a whole in both job...

Improving manufacturing’s performance is a crucial part of the solution to America’s trade, innovation, and income distribution problems and is especially important to the well-being of metropolitan areas throughout the Great Lakes region. Manufacturing’s decline has contributed to the...