Dallas and Texas among top places for jobs created by foreign investment

Posted by David Gunderson on Jun 21, 2014 12:59:00 PM

The Dallas-Fort Worth area and Texas are among the top places in the country for jobs created by foreign investment, reflecting increased global integration and economic impact, according to a first-of-its-kind report to be released Friday by Brookings Institution and JPMorgan Chase.

Texas ranked second, after California, with 462,465 jobs in 2011. Dallas-Fort Worth was eighth among the nation’s top 100 metro areas, with 134,111 jobs. Houston was fourth with 178,005 jobs.

The United States is the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment dollars, yet until now there’s been no regional data showing where in the U.S. foreign companies invest and where related jobs are created.

The report is really showing us for the first time the on-the-ground impact of foreign-direct investment into the U.S.,” said report co-author Kenan Fikri, a research analyst for Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program. “Foreign direct investment plays a huge role in bringing technologies developed elsewhere into the U.S. to have an impact.”

Nationally, foreign-owned companies employed more than 5.6 million people in 2011, according to the report. The nation’s largest metro areas contained about three-quarters of those jobs.

The U.S. industries seeing the most jobs from foreign investment were manufacturing, energy and finance, Fikri said.

Foreign-owned companies employed 5 percent of the U.S. private workforce in 2011, up from 4.2 percent in 1991. It was 5.1 percent in Texas, up from 4 percent in 1991.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, foreign-owned companies accounted for 5.2 percent of all private jobs, up from 4.8 percent in 1991. The metro average was 5.5 percent.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, the industries that provided the most foreign-investment-related jobs included pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing (7,100), meat and poultry products (5,800) and telecommunications equipment (4,100). Still, no single industry accounted for more than 6 percent of all jobs at foreign-owned businesses in the area’s diversified economy.

“Dallas is probably the foremost cluster in the U.S. for telecommunications,” Fikri said. Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE recently chose Dallas as U.S. headquarters, joining AT&T and Ericsson.

Foreign-owned businesses in Dallas-Fort Worth are from 50 countries. The top five countries were England, France, Switzerland, Japan and Canada.

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Published: 20 June 2014 12:13 AM

Link to the original article here.

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