Economy
May 22, 2019
Reshoring Initiative: 1,389 Companies, 145,000 Jobs Returned to U.S. in 2018
Written by Tim Triplett
Last year, the number of companies reporting new reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) jumped by 38 percent over 2017, accounting for 145,000 new jobs in the U.S. The total number of manufacturing jobs brought to the U.S. from offshore is now over 757,000 since the manufacturing employment low of 2010, reports the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit whose mission is to assist companies in bringing good manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
Allowing for a two-year lag from announcement to hire, the cumulative announcements since 2010 have driven 31 percent of the total increase in U.S. manufacturing jobs during that period and 3.3 percent of total end-of-2018 manufacturing employment of 12.8 million. The Reshoring Initiative largely attributes the increases to greater U.S. competitiveness due to corporate tax and regulatory cuts. Similar to the previous few years, FDI continued to exceed reshoring in terms of total jobs added, but reshoring has closed most of the gap since 2015.
