By: Annie Lowrey, The New York Times SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — The Obama administration has long heralded the potential of American factories to offer good, stable middle-class jobs in an economy that desperately needs them. But experts say there might be another advantage to expanding manufacturing in the United States: a more innovative economy. A growing chorus of economists, engineers and business leaders are warning that the evisceration of the manufacturing work force over the last 30 years might not have scarred just Detroit and the Rust Belt. It might have dimmed the country’s capacity to innovate and stunted the prospects for long-term growth. “In sector after sector, we’ve lost our innovation edge because we don’t produce goods here anymore,” said Mitzi Montoya, dean of the college of technology and innovation at Arizona State University. These experts say that in industries that produce complex, high-technology products — things like bioengineered tissues, not light bulbs — companies that keep their research and manufacturing employees close together might be more innovative than businesses that develop a schematic and send it overseas for low-wage workers to make. Moreover, clusters of manufacturers, where workers and ideas can naturally flow between companies, might prove more productive and innovative than the same businesses if they were spread across the country. A General Electric facility in upstate New York provides a test case. In a custom-built facility the size of four football fields, workers are casting into thin tubes a kind of ceramic that G.E. invented. Those tubes get filled with a secret chemical “brownie mix,” packaged into batteries and shipped across the world. The plant sits just a few miles down the road from the research campus where G.E. scientists developed the technology. That allows them to work out kinks on the assembly line, and test prototypes of and uses for the battery, the company’s scientists said. “We’re not thinking about just one generation,” said Glen Merfeld of G.E.’s chemical energy systems laboratory, showing off a test battery his employees had run into exhaustion. “We’re working on the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth.” The idea is to knit together manufacturing, design, prototyping and production, said Michael Idelchik, vice president...

By: Manufacturing Business Technology October U.S. manufacturing technology orders totaled $459.16 million according to AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology. This total, as reported by companies participat­ing in the USMTO program, was down 31.3 percent from September and down 0.1 percent when compared with the total of $459.41 million reported for October 2011. With a year-to-date total of $4,753.68 million, 2012 is up 5.3 percent compared with 2011. These numbers and all data in this report are based on the totals of actual data reported by companies participating in the USMTO program. “Orders continue to be on pace for a record-setting year, and a monthly drop was fully ex­pected in the month following IMTS,” said Douglas K. Woods, AMT President. “While manu­facturing continues to play a strong role in economic recovery, our main concern heading toward the end of the year is that lawmakers do what’s necessary to avoid the ‘fiscal cliff,’ and the impli­cations it could have on the broader economy.” The United States Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) report, compiled by the trade association representing the production and distribution of manufacturing technology, pro­vides regional and national U.S. orders data of domestic and imported machine tools and related equipment. Analysis of manufacturing technology orders provides a reliable leading economic indicator as manufacturing industries invest in capital metalworking equipment to increase ca­pacity and improve productivity. U.S. manufacturing technology orders are also reported on a regional basis for five geographic break­downs of the United States. Northeast Region Manufacturing technology orders in the Northeast Region in October totaled $63.69 million, down 19.7 percent from September’s $79.27 million and down 3.6 percent when compared with the October 2011 figure. At $640.83 million, 2012 year-to-date is down 5.7 percent when compared with 2011 at the same time. Southern Region Southern Region manufacturing technology orders totaled $60.69 million in October, down 41.1 percent from the $102.99 million total for September but 12.8 percent higher than the total for October 2011. The year-to-date total of $683.23 million is 15.3 percent more than the comparable figure for 2011. Midwest Region At $162.75 million, October manufacturing technology orders in the Midwest Region were down 20.0 percent when compared with the $203.33 million...

By: Paul Davidson, USA Today The election is over and the spotlight is on the fiscal cliff. Yet the Washington political drama over year-end tax increases and spending cuts will eventually end, as all do. Some business leaders are already looking past it to a more difficult challenge: the decline of U.S. competitiveness. A recurring theme in the presidential campaign, the USA’s dominant position in the global marketplace has been declining for more than a decade. It underlies the listless recovery, weak job growth and decline of the middle class, economists say. Next week, a coalition of business leaders will press a longer-term to-do list on Washington’s politicians. Its 200 items include cutting corporate taxes, streamlining regulations, upgrading the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and creating a more highly skilled workforce. The nation’s $16 trillion debt itself is a deterrent to U.S. competitiveness because it crimps government investment in education and infrastructure and creates uncertainty among businesses about taxes and interest rates. The Council on Competitiveness, a group of CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders, notes that many of the issues aren’t partisan in nature and should draw support from both parties in a divided Congress. “We need to make the United States a leader in attracting investment, growing jobs and delivering prosperity,” says Deborah Wince-Smith, who heads the competitiveness council. “And we’re falling behind in all those things.” Despite its slippage, the U.S. is still an economic power and the world’s manufacturing leader. And in recent years, falling U.S. factory wages and energy prices have allowed it to narrow its business-cost gap with other countries. Over the long term, however, its status has declined as manufacturers have outsourced millions of jobs to countries that have lower wages, such as China; capitalism has spread to formerly closed economies, and technology has allowed companies to do business almost anywhere. The World Economic Forum recently said the USA’s global ranking among the most competitive economies fell for the fourth year in a row in 2012, from fifth to seventh. It listed government bureaucracy, high taxes and an inadequately educated workforce among the biggest deterrents for doing business here. And in a recent Harvard Business School survey of nearly...

By: Agence France-Presse, Industry Week The U.S. trade deficit narrowed in September to $41.5 billion, down from $43.8 billion in August, on a rebound in exports to a record level, government data released Thursday showed. Exports of goods and services jumped 3.1% from August, to $187 billion, eclipsing a 1.4% rise in imports to $228.5 billion, according to seasonally adjusted Commerce Department data. Exports of goods rebounded after two straight months of declines, surging 4.2% month-on-month to $134 billion, while services exports rose to $53.0 billion. The Commerce Department said overall September exports were the highest on record. Imports meanwhile registered their first increase in five months. The improvement in the trade deficit surprised most analysts, who had forecast it would widen to $45.4 billion. “September’s shrinking trade deficit was a surprise amid weak growth in Europe and lackluster trade reported with our largest export market, Canada,” said Michael Wolf at Moody’s Analytics. Natixis analyst Julien Thomas said the rebound in both exports and imports, the latter partly driven by capital goods and industrial supplies, “can be interpreted as a positive signal for the manufacturing sector.” The improvement came in the context of slowing global trade and paltry growth in the U.S. economy, the eurozone’s public debt crisis and a slowdown in China, the world’s second largest economy. The U.S. trade gap has steadily narrowed in the past four months. On a three-month moving average, the trade gap stood at $42.6 billion in September, down from $49.7 billion for the three months ended in May. The nation’s politically sensitive gap with China, which contributes to the bulk of the trade deficit, continued to rise in September. The goods deficit with China edged up 1.3% from August to $29.1 billion. In the year to date, the gap widened 6.8% compared with the same period in 2011. The overall trade deficit grew 1.5% in the same period. The gap with Canada, the country’s largest trade partner, fell 17.5% in September from August. With the crisis-mired European Union, the deficit dropped a sharp...

By: National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) President and CEO Jay Timmons issued this statement today following the release of the October employment report: “October’s meager uptick sandwiched between months of job loss and the looming fiscal cliff continues the troubling one step forward, two steps back trend. This report is more evidence that the economy is stuck in neutral, and we desperately need leaders to champion policies that will support job creation and grow the economy. Manufacturers are increasingly worried that the unemployment rate, coupled with Washington’s failure to address the fiscal cliff, has already dampened GDP by 0.6 percentage points this year, as shown in the NAM’s Fiscal Shock report released last week. Alarmingly, falling off the cliff will lead our economy into a recession in 2013, with nearly 6 million jobs lost through 2014. Manufacturers need leadership and action from Washington to avert the fiscal cliff and create jobs at a level that will significantly bring down the unemployment rate. On Tuesday, voters will decide the direction of our economy, and the 12 million people who work in manufacturing will make their voices heard because America’s economy is at...