State Exports slow, but still strong

Manufactured goods accounted for 78.2 percent of all state exports in May. Shipments abroad from local factories, adjusted for seasonal variation, fell $9.7 million, or 4.8 percent, from the previous month to $189.6 million. 

Manufactured goods accounted for 78.2 percent of all state exports in May. Shipments abroad from local factories, adjusted for seasonal variation, fell $9.7 million, or 4.8 percent, from the previous month to $189.6 million. Despite the decline, exports of manufactured goods registered the second-highest level on record.

More important, compared with a year ago, manufacturer’s foreign shipments from Nevada companies were $45.6 million, or 31.7 percent higher. An export-led recovery is underway this year in Nevada’s manufacturing industries.

That is important news for manufacturers’ sales and profits as well as for the labor markets in the Silver State. The industrial mix of international sales implies that one in every nine local factory jobs is generated by exports.

Exports of non-manufactured goods totaled $52.8 million in May, a 2.2 increase from April. This group of shipments abroad consists of agricultural goods, mining products, and re-exports which are foreign goods that entered the state as imports and are exported in substantially the same condition as when imported.

At the national level, exports of goods, adjusted for seasonal variation, jumped 4.2 percent in May to $68.7 billion from April, mainly reflecting increases in capital goods; industrial supplies and materials; foods, feeds, and beverages; and automotive vehicles, parts, and engines.

Looking at export growth — a measure of the intensity that U.S. companies penetrate foreign markets in the global economy — Nevada again ranked first among the fifty states for its performance this year.

In the January-May period, Nevada’s exports, adjusted for seasonal variation, grew by an annual rate of 64.6 percent from the same period in 2003. In the first five months of this year, for the nation as a whole, exports increased 13.9 percent, compared with the same period in 2003. Nevada’s exporters marketed their products internationally four times better the national average.

Who’s buying goods made in Nevada? Most of this year’s strong rebound in Nevada’s exports came from Switzerland’s contribution to overall foreign demand. In the first five months of this year, Swiss importers bought $325.6 million of merchandise from local producers, an astonishing 473 percent leap from the same period in 2003.

Consumers and businesses in Canada — the state’s second biggest market — spent $235.3 million to buy made-in-Nevada goods, 26 percent more than in 2003.

Exports to the Euro Zone — the 12 members of the European Union that use the Euro as their currency — totaled $100.7 million in the January to May period this year, making the area the state’s third-biggest foreign buyer.

Shipments to Japan, the state’s fourth important trading partner, climbed 58 percent in the first five months of 2004 to $49.3 million. Nevada’s exports to businesses in Mexico declined 14 percent in the first five months of 2004 from the same period in 2003.
 

  Evangelos Otto Simos, chief economist at the consulting and research firm Infometrica Inc., is editor for International Affairs in the Journal of Business Forecasting and professor and chair of the Economics department at the University of New Hampshire.

Simos can be reached at: eosimos@infometrica.com

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