Economics of Virginia

earliest Virginia site for manufacturing glass (1608 and 1621-22) and "reconstructed" furnace at Jamestown
(click on images for larger versions)

Businesses do not locate their facilities at random, by throwing dats at a map or looking at just the sources of labor and raw materials. State, county, and city governments are active players in attracting private sector businesses and non-government organizations to locate in a particular area.

Your tax dollars are also used to retain jobs and property taxes, when other governments try to entice existing companies in Virginia to move to another location. For example, Virginia's A.L. Philpott Manufacturing Extension Partnership (VPMEP) was described in a news release¹ as follows:

The partnership, based in Martinsville and named after the late House Speaker A.L. Philpott of Bassett, works to improve the manufacturing capabilities and global competitiveness of manufacturers through offices in Danville, Harrisonburg, Lynchburg, Newport News, Norfolk, Richmond, Roanoke, Winchester and Wytheville. Internal VPMEP resources are supplemented by private consultants, community colleges, universities, and government agencies. VPMEP partners with Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology to provide access to high technology resources across the Commonwealth.

In addition, VPMEP works in partnership with the Technology Applications Center (TAC) at Old Dominion University and the Manufacturing Technology Center (MTC) in Wytheville to bring services to manufacturers from Hampton Roads to Southwest Virginia:

The Manufacturing Technology Center in southwestern Virginia is a consortium of five community colleges and is funded by VPMEP, the Commonwealth, CIT, and federal grants. It provides technology deployment and manufacturing modernization services in southwestern Virginia.

The Technology Applications Center at Old Dominion University is funded by VPMEP and CIT. It primarily provides faculty-based engineering services to manufacturers for high technology product and process prototype development and testing in the Hampton Roads area and across Virginia.

VPMEP is based in Martinsville in part because A. L. Phillpott was the powerful Speaker of the House of Delegates, and he represented Pittsylvania County. Even before passage of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), the textile, furniture, and other manufacturing businesses were reducing work hours and closing plants. The state and the local governments recruit companies that could provide high-wage manufacturing jobs to replace the companies that are leaving are reducing hours.

The Certified Business Location program, begun in the latter half of the 1980s, required each locality to establish an Industrial Development Authority, formalize their industry targeting activities, and establish other processes in support of industrial development. However, the Virginia Department of Economic Development no longer offers the certification. (What's the point of a certification if everyone has received it?)

A snapshot of Virginia's economy, from the 1992 Economic Census Area Profiles - Virginia:

Sector	Number of estabs	sales or Receipts ($mil)	Number of Jobs	Output per capita	Jobs/1000 Population (Number)	Jobs/1000 Population (% of US)	Estabs/1000 Population (Number)	Estabs/100,000 Population (% of US)
Mining	577	2,891	15,900	452	2	99	9	75
Construction	17,151	14,033	143,644	2,195	22	123	268	119
Manufacturing	6,524	66,081	407,200	10,334	64	96	102	70
Transportation	4,551	4,745	54,973	742	9	69	71	99
Communications	1,038	7,658	43,079	1,198	7	133	16	106
Utilities	299	6,222	22,070	973	3	96	5	59
Wholesale	9,290	51,453	115,806	8,046	18	77	145	75
Retail	37,360	48,049	474,595	7,514	74	103	584	98
Services	45,905	33,606	525,742	5,256	82	109	718	100
Finance	4,767	17,002	69,845	2,659	11	62	75	89
Insurance	3,819	15,582	43,338	2,437	7	80	60	95
Real Estate	5,335	3,741	33,744	585	5	109	83	93

If you look at the Jobs/1000 population column, you can see that Virginia had 23% more Construction jobs than the nationwide average. Nationally, the average was 18 jobs in construction/1000 people - Virginia had 22 jobs/1,000 in that sector. Virginia's economy produced significantly more jobs than the national average in Communications as well, but the state economy was weak at creating jobs in the Finance, Transportation, Wholesale, and Insurance sectors. In Manufacturing, Virginia had only 70% of the jobs that would be expected, according to the manufacturing relative to population ratio of Plants Sites & Parks magazine.