South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Scholar Daniel Gros wonders if the U.S. has lost the workforce skills needed to produce high-tech exports.

Like Southern Europe, the US economy must move away from the consumption/housing-led growth model of the last decade. President Barack Obama has encapsulated this challenge by setting the goal of doubling US exports over the next decade. But this is easier said than done.
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The structural shift towards exports will be difficult and time-consuming mainly because producing the high-tech goods that the US should be exporting requires a skilled workforce, which has largely been lost and cannot be re-created overnight. During the ten years preceding the peak of the bubble in 2007, about four million jobs were lost in the US manufacturing sector, whose share in total employment fell from more than 17% to 12%. Unemployment remained low because the booming domestic economy created enough jobs in services and construction.
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Reversing this shift quickly seems impossible. Most construction workers are rather low-skilled and thus cannot be re-deployed to modern high-tech manufacturing. The same applies to real-estate agents, social workers, and managers of credit-card accounts.