by
David J. Peters
dpeters@ded.state.mo.us
The United States economy is restructuring from an industrial economy to a post-industrial economy. This entails a shift in the core industries that drive the economy, away from manufacturing and transportation towards communications, finance and advanced services. This new core, composed of service and information producing firms, is what will drive the nation's growth in the coming decades. Therefore, it is imperative that policy-makers at all levels of government understand the strengths and weaknesses of their labor base. Given the nature of the global economy, policy-makers need to identify areas of economic comparative advantage that they can build upon; and areas of economic vulnerability that they need to strengthen.
Increasingly, economic development efforts are focusing on attracting quality jobs, rather than attracting the largest quantity of jobs. Given this preference, the skill and occupational mix of the workforce is a crucial consideration in determining an economic development strategy. A region's chance of successfully attracting a particular industry rests heavily with the occupational base in the community. Labor requirements differ across industries and are based upon the primary economic activity of the firm. In essence, successful economic development partly rests with matching the available occupational base in the community with an industry’s occupational demand.
The purpose of this analysis is to provide indicators of the national competitiveness of a region's occupational base across several industries in the central Midwest. Occupational similarity can be used by economic developers and policy officials in two ways. First, ranking the similarity scores within a region provides a form of industry targeting that indicates which industries are best suited to the occupational base in the region. Second, industries with high dissimilarity are identified so that programs can be developed which strengthen the labor force in the region in order to make the area more attractive to selected industries.
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
