The Strickland administration, which is expanding the number of foreign-trade offices from 11 to 13, understands international trade's potential for creating Ohio jobs.
The Department of Development is opening new offices in Australia and India. Ohio's trade offices around the globe are intended to build relationships that translate into new business for the state.
A weak dollar has brightened U.S. prospects for foreign trade, and Ohio is well-positioned in this fast-growing sector of the American economy. The state's exports have grown from $27.7 billion in 2002 to $37.8 billion in 2006.
Ohio is trying to develop a new economy, based on high-tech advances, innovation and diversification. The heavy-industry model that worked so well in the 20th century is gone for good.
Ohio's loss of 200,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000 has been fodder for political campaigns in 2004 and again this year, but the shrinking of factory work forces isn't the complete story. As industrial giants reduced Ohio operations, the state's economy became more diversified. A Sunday Dispatch article noted that in 2006, more than 25 Ohio private-sector employers had 12,000 or more employees, compared with just 10 companies in 1995.
Concerns about lost jobs overshadowed the fact that Ohio manufacturers have produced goods more efficiently with fewer workers. Since 2000, manufacturing output in Ohio has grown by 12 percent, the National Association of Manufacturers reported.
Many of the job losses were offset by an increase in service jobs, particularly in the health-care industry. No hospital systems were among Ohio's top-10 largest employers in 1995. Three were listed among the top-10 largest employers in 2006.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has made the North American Free Trade Agreement one of his punching bags, and Hillary Clinton has scrambled to distance herself from the free-trade agreement approved early in Bill Clinton's administration. Critics of NAFTA cite the jobs lost, not those gained, by commercial cooperation among the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
In fact, NAFTA wasn't primarily to blame for job losses in Ohio, Michigan and other industrial states. The trend toward cutting costs by shipping jobs overseas was well under way before NAFTA took effect on Jan. 1, 1994. Many of the jobs transferring to Mexico would have been outsourced to factories in Asia or elsewhere even if the free-trade pact had died on the drawing board.
There is no doubt that Ohio has a long way to go in retooling its economy and work force for the 21st century, but campaign rhetoric that mischaracterizes the true nature of global economic changes and that promises simplistic solutions will not help.
While free trade entails pain for workers whose industries cannot keep pace with international competition, in the long run, free trade produces net benefits for the nations that participate in it. Ohio will not return to the business models of the past century, but the state has all the resources necessary to carve out a new and prosperous place in the global economy.
