While real estate and construction remain down, state leaders Tuesday touted how international trade has helped Florida's economy recover.
Chris Thompson, president and CEO of Visit Florida, speaking as part of a panel at the Florida Chamber of Commerce International Days conference at Florida State University, said international travelers account for nearly 10 percent of the states top import: tourists.
Of the 8 million international visitors in the first three quarters of 2011, Brazil sent 1 million to Florida, topping the United Kingdom for the first time, Thompson said.
And thats with all the visa challenges to get here, Thompson said. That will help everything thats related to economic development.
Debra May, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs chief of development and information, credited partnerships between states for helping the growth in agriculture.
An example of this is Florida Tomato Committee teams up with California Tomato Committee to supply tomatoes to Japans food service industry, May said. Since we are seasonal, we are able to team up with other states to meet the needs of other countries. So we just need to get out there and do our research.
For those already in Florida, Chris Hart, president of Workforce Florida, said the biggest challenge is to keep workers' skill sets up to date as the economy continues to rebound.
So far, he said, it appears to be working.
In November, 16,399 individuals wereplaced in jobs through Workforce; in December the number was 25,201. On Wednesday, the agency will formally announce that in January 36,000 individuals were placed.
Its amazing what happens when you have the strongest possible focus and you measure every single day against your goal, Hart said.
Meanwhile, the perception that America is on the decline as the worlds economic leader couldnt be further from the truth, Robert T. McGee, U.S. Trust, Bank of America director of Macro Strategy and Research, told Florida business leaders looking at growing international trade on Tuesday.
McGee said that the fear that America would be surpassed by the Soviet Union and its satellite countries during the Cold War, and then Japan in the 1990s never happened for the same reason he doesnt foresee China -- despite our nations debt to the Asian country -- overtaking America:
That's because of the adaptability of American corporations to a changing, information-driven world.
Nobody rivals the U.S. in services, McGee said. Mickey Mouse is a service, thats a big business. Facebook is a business. Googles a business. Apples a business. All of these things are dominating the worlds evolution into the Information Age and the United States has the leading innovative companies in those realms and we have the culture that fosters young people to surf on the edge of this information change.
By comparison, McGee said, when the Arab Spring blew up, China tightened its Internet security.
You can never be the leader in an information age if youre basically trying to repress peoples ability to get information, McGee said.
More importantly, technology has helped people see, via the Internet and other electronic means, the opportunities that are afforded elsewhere, which has reduced the ability of any third-world nations to play the United States and the Soviet Union and China against each other when seeking financial aid.
The desire to improve your living conditions is a universal desire, and as technology brings the world into a closer knit communications network, the people who have been left out are being more and more impatient, McGee said. Our success is what people see and want to emulate.
However, while technological innovations have helped place manufacturing ahead of manufacturing jobs during prior recovery periods, globalization has also played a hand in widening the gulf between upper and lower income levels, he said.
There are more people working today with college degrees than there were at the peak of the last recovery, despite the fact that were still five or six million jobs behind the overall amount of jobs we had at the peak of the last recovery, he said.
The reason theyre falling behind is that in a pool of seven billion people theyre competing with the vast majority of those people.
In other words, Floridians arent just competing against other Americans, but against the world for work.
The elite in the United States may be 20 percent, but in the global economy it might be as little as 2 or 3 percent because were only 5 percent of the worlds population.
He said the goal should be to raise the skill levels of those at the lower end so they could take advantage of the opportunities the U.S. offers so individuals can be competitive.
Overall, McGee said the outlook for the U.S. economy is positive, particularly in foreign exports, which is why the forecast is strong for the second half of 2012.
Part of the reason for optimism, which someone who is among the nations unemployed may not agree with, is the nations unique economic ups and downs, something that nations with shorter histories of a free market and more traditional cultural impediments have yet to experience.
Our labor markets were used to layoffs in a way that a lot of other countries are not. That allows the labor market to transition from the dying places to the new places, McGee said.
He said the current recovery has been unusual because of the continued downturn in the housing market and a weak government sector, though the recession technically ended in June 2009.
If you look at the growth rate of jobs outside of government, construction and the financial industry, which is also going through the wringer, what youll see is the growth rate of jobs is faster than any time in the last 10 years during this most recent year. But we have to work through these problems.
He credited U.S. monetary policies with keeping the country from experiencing a collapse equal to the Great Depression, and noted that the Europe Union is just now realizing it needs similar regulation.
Thats because the European Central Bank doesnt have a unified mandate like the Fed, and its also because the leadership of the ECB didnt understand what it was doing the last couple of years. Fortunately, there is a new head of the ECB since November, and they have started to do the things that will stop the European banking system from repeating a Lehman-like crisis.
Reach Jim Turner at jturner@sunshinestatenews.com or at (772) 215-9889.
