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State revenues experienced their steepest plunge in 25 years in the final quarter of the fiscal year ending June 30, 2020, according to a recent analysis by Pew. It also notes that while some of those revenues were expected to be recovered, nearly half of all states were still projecting revenue declines this fiscal year.

Last month, Gov. Laura Kelly (D), alongside former state governors Mike Hayden (R) and John Carlin (D), and the Lt. Gov.

In an event organized by the Hutchins Center on fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings, academics from some of the nation’s leading universities sought to answer questions centered around Opportunity Zones (OZs), including what is the goal of OZs, are they helping, and how would we know? The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created more than 8,700 Opportunity Zones (OZs) across the United States. The program was intended to spur economic development in distressed communities and offered favorable capital gains tax treatment to investments in such locations.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation announced a new structure for its subcommittees in the 117th Congress, bringing the total number from six to seven. The subcommittees are:

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Start Us Up coalition announced an update to the America’s New Business Plan platform to advance entrepreneurship. The update places a strong emphasis on the importance of addressing the historical inequities of the American economy, as well as the urgent concerns of the coronavirus pandemic. The lead-in to the specific policy proposals also acknowledges the importance of providing sufficient support to new companies, not just all small businesses.

As governors continue to roll out their State-of-the State addresses in the month of February, we continue to see a heavy focus on recovering from the pandemic. Given most state’s fiscal condition, governors have been generally hesitant to roll out new initiatives during this time, although broadband continues to receive attention, especially with the renewed attention surrounding its importance during the pandemic.

This week, the U.S. Economic Development Administration announced that the Build to Scale program has opened for applications. The Build to Scale program provides operating funding for tech-based economic development initiatives in regional economies. This program has long been a top priority for SSTI’s Innovation Advocacy Council, and we are happy that our continued success in raising the program’s appropriation means this year’s funding opportunity will award $38 million in grants.

Discussions surrounding automation’s power and the effect it could have on jobs have only increased over time. The current pandemic adds to the debate of whether automation and robotics, which are unaffected by viruses and have the potential for cost savings, could offer a safer bet for industries than human labor. Such are the debates the authors of a new working paper considered in their research examining jobs that were identified in the past as being at risk of elimination through automation.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has updated its Technology Assessment Design Handbook, a program evaluation tool designed to assist in the development of robust technology assessments. First released to the public in December 2019, the handbook now includes additions based on the experiences of GAO teams, a review of relevant literature, and comments submitted by external experts. It also provides a high-level process for developing policy options.

Metropolitan areas in the U.S. with fewer than 370,000 residents are more likely to be more economically reliant on R&D performed by colleges and universities than larger metros, according to new SSTI analysis. Three data points are used to consider how R&D at institutions of higher education is impacting a region’s economy: NSF’s Higher Education R&D (HERD) data on expenditures at individual institutions; metro area Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis; and population estimates from the Census Bureau.

Editor’s notes. Feb. 18: We have updated the article to reflect assignments to key subcommittees in both the House and Senate. 

Nearly a month into the 117th Congress, formal committee assignments are being announced. The highest-priority committees for tech-based economic development policies are those affecting science and small business issues. The lists, below, provide a description of those committees in the Senate and House for the next two years.

Senate Commerce Committee

Ohio unveiled the Columbus Innovation District this week, marking the third such announcement in less than a year, with a $100 million commitment from JobsOhio, the state’s nonprofit economic development corporation. Other partners in the Columbus initiative include Ohio State University, which will contribute $650 million, and Nationwide Children’s Hospital, with a $350 million commitment.

A working paper from the Innovation Growth Lab (IGL) series featuring researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition provides causal evidence on the effectiveness of innovation vouchers and adds to the argument for implementing small-scale government funding mechanisms like innovation vouchers.

While natural gas production has continued to expand throughout the Appalachian region, the surrounding communities have yet to experience the economic and social benefits that were initially seen as surefire byproducts of the natural gas industry’s growing footprint within the area, according to a new report.

Already weakened before the pandemic, a new report from the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) finds that the health and readiness of the U.S. defense industrial base — composed of manufacturers, technology innovators, and systems integrators, research organizations, and suppliers — faces particularly large obstacles in the areas of innovation and supply chain. Assessed along eight different metrics, NDIA assigns an overall letter grade indicating the health and readiness of the defense industrial base.

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) is building a program to create new career pathways for low-income rural students. Through a partnership with the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development at Purdue University, the program will address the needs of rural employers by creating a model to identify rural workforce needs, developing stakeholder partnerships, mapping workforce pathways, recruiting and supporting low-income rural learners, and building entrepreneurship and leadership skills.

Policymakers will need to consider the larger social and economic conditions associated with efforts to decarbonize the U.S. energy system if the nation is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Given higher education’s role in generating the knowledge that catalyzes innovative new technologies developed by high-growth startups, R&D conducted at institutions of higher education is one of the most important metrics for evaluating an area’s innovation economy. This edition of Useful Stats examines NSF’s recently updated Higher Education R&D (HERD) survey, finding that most states, although not all, experienced growth in HERD expenditures from 2018 to 2019.

The U.S. House of Representatives is working through the coronavirus relief package in committee markups this week, and there are several provisions that could have a significant impact for regional innovation economies. The highest-profile of these is $10 billion for a new State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) program. Reauthorizing this program has been a top priority for SSTI's Innovation Advocacy Council, as SSBCI was one of the federal government’s only sources of funding for equity investments in the past two decades.

Despite facing enormous challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturers and Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Centers continued to deliver a “consistent and significant return on investment to the nation,” in FY 2020, according to a new analysis from the W.E. Upjohn Institute. MEP Centers deliver technical assistance to primarily small- and medium-sized manufacturing establishments to help them improve their productivity and competitiveness.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives again passed the National Apprenticeships Act, which is intended to increase the diversity of occupations and people covered by approved apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeships receive substantial attention for their track record of strong economic impacts when measured at the state level, and the bill also hopes to improve the ability to track impacts across the country.

The Blackstone Charitable Foundation has announced a $40 million commitment to expand the Blackstone LaunchPad program to support underrepresented students and communities. Going forward, LaunchPad will focus on colleges and universities that have a majority diverse population or are serving under-resourced communities, increasing the program from 30 to 75 campuses over the next five years. The LaunchPad program mentors college student-founders from idea to growth stage and provides other mentoring to students interested in entrepreneurship.

Industry investment in research and development (R&D) indicates, literally, how invested each state’s businesses are in creating new products and processes. To better-understand industry’s commitment to innovation, business R&D can be viewed as a percentage of each state’s private sector gross domestic product (GDP), providing a measure of research intensity. This measure highlights substantial differences in the orientation of states’ businesses toward research, with some states seeing an investment rate of less than 1 percent while others are above 5 percent.

More than half of the nation’s governors have given their State-of-the-State addresses, and in this week’s coverage of the addresses, we complete our review of those that addressed their constituencies through January. As the COVID-19 crisis highlighted the need for greater broadband connectivity and affordability, we again see the state leaders focusing more attention on building out those capabilities. Diversifying state economies also plays a role in Alaska, Hawaii and New Mexico, while opportunities for development through renewables features in addresses from Nevada and New York.

This week’s edition of Useful Stats examines the contributions to county-level GDP in 2019 by industry group. Specifically, this analysis identifies the industries that contributed the most to the economic output of each county in 2019, finding that the real estate and rental and leasing; manufacturing; and government and government enterprises industry groups were vital economic drivers in terms of both their contributions to national GDP as well as the number of counties where they were the top contributor.