Manufacturing within our globalized world is frequently a transient activity. Multinational firms continuously assess facilities and willingly relocate them if more profitable, productive, or stable opportunities become available elsewhere. Higher energy costs and sluggish productivity levels have caused some multinational corporations to consider building new facilities in the United States or to relocate existing manufacturing facilities to the United States or nearby in Mexico. Despite a growing number of anecdotal reports, policymakers and planners know very little about the scale and extent of future investment in U.S. manufacturing, reshoring (the return of off-shored manufacturing) or nearshoring (the relocation of manufacturing facilities to nearby, low-cost nations). This PRP will critically assess these emerging topics and investigate whether there is a new era of manufacturing in the United States and, if it exists at any meaningful scale, its potential impacts and prospects. The PRP’s ultimate goal, however, will be to determine whether these trends should influence the policies and planning for freight transportation within Texas and between Texas and Mexico. The PRP will focus on the following topics:
What are the current practices and geographic concentrations for various manufacturing industries and which ones are susceptible to locate or relocate to the United States or Mexico?
How are Texas’s and Mexico’s economies positioned to attract new manufacturing facilities or the relocation of facilities from other regions of the world (e.g. its industrial specialization, workforce, wages and productivity, access to raw and intermediate materials, transportation network, etc.)?
Under various scenarios, how could new investment in manufacturing, reshoring, or nearshoring impact Texas’s internal and binational transportation infrastructure and trade corridors?
What might be some of the other global trends that could hasten or diminish this nascent rebirth of manufacturing in the United States of affect reshoring or nearshoring trends in Texas or Mexico?
This PRP is being coordinated with the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) Transportation Planning and Programming (TPP) Division. The PRP’s deliverables will be a final report and a presentation of the study’s findings to TxDOT staff, as well as several short policy briefs. There is a possibility of funded student travel to conduct interviews and to collect data and other relevant information from public-sector officials and individuals working in the private-sector.
Project Directors
Michael Bomba is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Center for Economic Development and Research at the University of North Texas. He also serves as the Chair of the International Trade and Transportation Committee of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies.
Leigh Boske is a Professor of Public Affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, whose work has focused on transportation, trade, and economic issues. In addition to his appointment at the LBJ School, he has also been a senior economist for the U.S. Congress and a policy advisor for the Texas Transportation Commission. Additionally, Dr. Boske has served on various international, national, and state-level panels related to international trade and transportation issues.