It is widely recognized that the United States faces a global economic challenge like never before. Many Americans already have seen their jobs exported overseas and their standard of living downsized.
But the movement of jobs abroad is far from over, and it isn't just manufacturing jobs at risk. Economist Alan Binder, a former member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, in 2006 wrote that between 28 million and 42 million service-sector jobs were at risk of being "offshored," in addition to 14 million manufacturing jobs.
The question is: What are we going to do about it?
In a recent report, "Blueprint for American Prosperity," the Brookings In stitution's Metropolitan Policy Pro gram sug gests we need to begin by recogniz ing our strengths. The report spends a great deal of ink establish ing that the overwhelm ing source of the nation's economic might is to be found in its metropolitan areas.
"Metro areas aren't part of the national economy. They are the national economy," Brookings argues with reams of facts and figures.
This would seem, on the face of it, self-evident, especially when one considers the expansive definition that the government applies to a metropolitan area. But there is a certain logic to it. Rural Perry County to the north of Harrisburg may appear not to be very metropolitan, but a large percentage of its residents commute out of county to get to work, so it properly belongs as part of the Harrisburg Metropolitan Area, along with Cumberland and Dauphin counties.
In fact, it has been noted by James Szymborski, executive director of Tri-County Regional Planning Commission, that the Harrisburg, York, Lancaster and Lebanon metro areas are close to merging on the fringes.
But the Brookings point is that the federal government, in particular, has failed to adjust to the metro reality of the nation's economic structure. It instead executes policy on the basis of individual municipalities, counties, states or congressional districts. Thus you have 6,000 congressional earmarks in a transportation bill, rather than a national transportation policy based on metropolitan areas. And you have programs, such as housing for the poor, concentrated where the poor live, rather than where the jobs exist, according to Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program.
"Innovation, human capital, infrastructure and quality places," the report contends, are the essential assets necessary to economic prosperity. And it maintains these assets are concentrated in metropolitan areas, of which Pennsylvania has 16, Philadelphia the largest and Williamsport the smallest.
None of the state's metro areas has achieved its full potential, according to Brookings. It recommends the creation of a federal National Innovation Foundation "to work with industries, universities and local and state government to spur innovation."
The challenge, however, is not simply for the federal government to create a streamlined process to spur economic development that recognizes the regional nature of economic units. No less important is that Pennsylvania's metropolitan areas begin to think, plan and act regionally.
It has been said a thousand times and repeatedly ignored, but the truth is that this state's multiplicity of local government entities hinders any effort to maximize the strengths each of the metro areas possesses.
We would argue, as well, that if the nation has entered a new period of permanently high energy prices, it becomes more critical than ever for the common good that metro areas learn to cooperate and act regionally.
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