Hartford in Nation's Top 20 Manufacturing Centers, Led by Aerospace

The Worcester area has the highest concentration of manufacturing jobs in New England, according to a report released by The Brookings Institution.  The report, "Locating American Manufacturing: Trends in the Geography of Production," ranked the Worcester area 15th in 2010 among the nation's metropolitan areas for percentage of manufacturing jobs as part of the region's employment mix, with 10.9 percent. Worcester was the highest-ranked New England metro area, ahead of Hartford, Conn., which ranked 19th nationally (10.5 percent).  The top three manufacturing industries in Hartford, according to the Brookings report, are aerospace, fabricated metals, and machinery. Metro Hartford lost about 23 percent of its manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2010, but that erosion was slower than losses in the South, Midwest and in the nation as a whole, where 33 to 34 percent of the jobs evaporated.  The Brookings Institution analyzed manufacturing employment in the nation's 100 largest metropolitan areas — including all jobs at manufacturing companies, not just production jobs.

Brookings noted that Fairfield headquartered General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt recently stated: [T]oday at GE we are outsourcing less and producing more in the U.S. . . . When we are deciding where to manufacture, we ask, ‘Will our people and technology in the U.S. provide us with a competitive advantage?’ Increasingly, the answer is yes.