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The Brookings Institute released a report today saying U.S. metros need to increase their exports. Attached is a list of 100 metros, Charleston, Columbia and Greenville included. Clicking on the city gives an exports profile. To be just a state capital and university town, Columbia does pretty well, but its export growth needs to grow faster. Charleston's export growth has taken off lately. Maybe the new jobs coming to Greenville will help it come out of its current negative export growth funk.
The Brookings Institute released a report today saying U.S. metros need to increase their exports. Attached is a list of 100 metros, Charleston, Columbia and Greenville included. Clicking on the city gives an exports profile. To be just a state capital and university town, Columbia does pretty well, but its export growth needs to grow faster. Charleston's export growth has taken off lately. Maybe the new jobs coming to Greenville will help it come out of its current negative export growth funk.
The Brookings Institute released a report today saying U.S. metros need to increase their exports. Attached is a list of 100 metros, Charleston, Columbia and Greenville included. Clicking on the city gives an exports profile. To be just a state capital and university town, Columbia does pretty well, but its export growth needs to grow faster. Charleston's export growth has taken off lately. Maybe the new jobs coming to Greenville will help it come out of its current negative export growth funk.
Greenville, a city of 55K exports 3.5 billion
Columbia a city of 120K exports only 2.6 billion
Wow, just wow! Greenville blows Columbia out of the water, and that is just the Greenville / Mauldin / Easley metro....doesn't include BMW just across the Spartanburg county line (BMW is the largest exporter in the state) or Anderson County.
Yep, I'd say the Upstate keeps its status as the economic engine.
Hopefully Columbia can move up some day and export as much as a city half its size.
Seeing as how Columbia's economy is based around the insurance industry, education, government, health care, finance and transportation, it isn't surprising that the exports aren't that high. As far as the previous poster is concerned, the figures are for the metro as a whole, not just the city. Of course that poster's continued lame attempts to make negative comments about Columbia at every turn are quite stale.
Yes, this is MSA compared to MSA. But we're all in it together and we all need to increase our exports. Greenville's new jobs should not only help the manufacturing-based (not government- or university-based) Greenville MSA get back up to par, but they should also help the entire state's exports picture.
MSA to MSA... that still excludes BMW, all of Spartanburg County and all of Anderson County. That's comparing populations that are 625,000 in Greenville to 750,000 in Cola. Furthermore, Columbia's MSA land area is significantly larger than Greenville's. That doesn't paint any better of a picture of Columbia's exports...
MSA to MSA... that still excludes BMW, all of Spartanburg County and all of Anderson County. That's comparing populations that are 625,000 in Greenville to 750,000 in Cola. Furthermore, Columbia's MSA land area is significantly larger than Greenville's. That doesn't paint any better of a picture of Columbia's exports...
That's to be expected for a metro area that doesn't have a large manufacturing sector. That's why the Greensboro MSA ranks higher than the Raleigh MSA and Raleigh is a significantly larger MSA. So it pays to look at the entire picture.
But of course, it's always Columbia that's brought up for the basis of comparison instead of Charleston for some odd reason.
That's to be expected for a metro area that doesn't have a large manufacturing sector. That's why the Greensboro MSA ranks higher than the Raleigh MSA and Raleigh is a significantly larger MSA. So it pays to look at the entire picture.
Obviously. But, they were griping because Gsupstate used the term 'city' instead of metro. Thus, I'm explaining that it doesn't really matter which term is used, the comparison is still the same, and Columbia's demographics are larger either way... I'm not as thick as you think. Follow the whole thread, buddy.
Obviously. But, they were griping because Gsupstate used the term 'city' instead of metro. Thus, I'm explaining that it doesn't really matter which term is used, the comparison is still the same, and Columbia's demographics are larger either way... I'm not as thick as you think. Follow the whole thread, buddy.
LOL, I was the first person to comment after the OP, so obviously I followed the entire thread. It was still worth pointing out that the study is about metro areas and not cities. It was merely a factual correction. Of course it "doesn't matter" when one's view is so narrowly confined to discrediting Columbia at every turn, but in terms of the study itself (that "big picture" I was referring to), it most certainly does matter. Certain people act like these studies are done with nothing more than Greenville and Columbia in mind. How about how SC's metros stack up to regional peers? How the state stacks up? Or how about critically looking at your own metro to assess what's being done right and what needs to be improved upon? This extremely insular view of "look how much Columbia sucks" and those who support it is quite unhealthy and ridiculous.
A capital city area that relies on government, a university and Fort Jackson to survive is supposed to even come close to the same amount of exports as a an area roughly six sevenths as large that is the center point for business activity in the state? I wasn't comparing the two MSAs' exports. I just found the article about U.S. cities needing to increase their exports interesting and posted it in the SC forum. What I stated about Greenville's export growth rate being in a funk was only meant to be matter of fact. The new jobs in the area should help it recover. Maybe more jobs will move in and it can go from there. Maybe in the meantime Columbia can improve on its export growth rate and we can all sing hallelujah from the same sheet of music.
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