In today’s Daily Data Discussion post let’s shift gears once again and take a look at manufacturing employment, specifically which markets have demonstrated the most impressive gains in manufacturing supersector growth over the past six months. 

Historically over the past decade as emerging market investors we’ve looked somewhat askance at manufacturing jobs given trends in the national economy de-emphasizing those jobs.   We were instructed by mentors almost a decade ago that a market shouldn’t be overly dependent on manufacturing jobs given their tendency to dwindle over time given changes from a manufacturing economy to an information based economy.  We even used a rule of thumb for some time that a market shouldn’t have more than 10% of its total employment base in manufacturing jobs. 

That rough rule of thumb doesn’t necessarily hold today as some trends have changed.  Certainly one changing trend has been a shift of manufacturing jobs from non-right-to-work states to right-to-work states; a prime example is that of automobile jobs leaving the rust belt and moving to Texas and the southeast.  Another changing trend has been given the weak dollar, US exports have expanded impressively over the past couple of years, strongly supporting the manufacturing section. 

When assessing a market today that is rich in manufacturing jobs, it’s imperative to look closely at the industry sector generating those jobs given the robust status of many manufacturers today. 

Here are the markets in our database as of today that have the highest rate of growth in the manufacturing supersector.  Data reported is a 6-month rolling average of the annualized rate of manufacturing supersector growth reported monthly by the BLS.

1.  KRP, WA   19.5%
2.  Topeka, KS   9.9%
3.  Yakima, WA   8.6%
4.  Greeley, CO   7.8%
5.  Bakersfield, CA  7.4%

Database Average:  -1.4%
Database Median:  -1.3%

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the markets around the country with the lowest rates of growth (or losses) in the manufacturing supersector. 

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