The Indiana Technology Innovation Super Cluster: Creating Jobs in a Mid-Western Regional Economic Environment

Abstract

The "just-so" happy story told by global trade proponents that promised that the loss of manufacturing jobs would be made up by the increase in "service sector" jobs is not supported by the BDS data, and it is just now dawning on state government officials that there is something seriously wrong with their traditional job creation policies based on industrial recruitment.

The dirty little secret of job creation and job loss in America is that there are no more big companies to recruit to all the vacant U. S. industrial parks, built on the lure of low cost production and the image of prosperity from the 1950's. Increasing the rate of industrial recruitment tax incentives is not going to change this picture.

Understanding the economic malfunction in the American labor markets contains two parts: Why is the rate of job creation in small companies so low and why is the rate of job destruction in older bigger companies so high? Both answers are tied together by a common factor related to how the United States implemented the new global trade policies in the past 20 years.

In the absence of economic vitality caused by investments in domestic technology innovation in the formerly integrated national economy, national economic growth strategy shifted to a series of speculative bubbles that did not create the conditions for sustained economic growth for small businesses. Large companies offshored manufacturing production jobs, and small businesses suffered because their regional industrial value chains were destroyed by the way global trade policies offshored the American foundation of innovation

Along with the new innovation park infrastructure, the most important job creation strategy that the EDA could implement is creating the new capital market infrastructure that targets investments to regional innovation opportunities. This is not a task that can be done by the private capital markets themselves because the creation of capital market infrastructure does not generate profits that can be appropriated by private actors.

Keywords: : job creation, Indiana, industrial recruitment, innovation economic development

JEL Classification: L16, M13, O16, O31, O32, O33, O34, O38, R12, R15, R58,