Brookings Metro

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Which communities will bear the brunt of Chinese retaliatory tariffs? In my new piece with Mark Muro and Shriya Methkupally, we find that nearly two-thirds of all jobs in industries poised to be affected by China's tariffs are in Trump-voting counties. The more rural nature of Trump-voting communities illustrates how smaller communities can, in fact, be more sensitive to disruptions in global trade flows than larger places. https://lnkd.in/eEmKcviv

With Trump standing by his threat to impose 10% tariffs on imports from China, and China sticking with its threat of counter-tariffs commencing on Monday, the nation may well be heading toward a new reminder of the unfortunate ways local communities can suffer collateral damage from international faceoffs. While the China clash will play out globally and strategically, its potential impacts in the U.S. will be localized and varied, since different regions have different local industry mixes and structures.   In a new analysis, The Brookings Institution’s Rob Maxim, Mark Muro, and Shriya Methkupally look at the local geography of the pending trade war as an example of how national tariff policies can hurt communities and their economies. The authors find that the affected industries account for between 400,000 and 700,000 jobs in the United States, with the industrial heartland bearing a disproportionate impact from China’s retaliation.  The proposed Chinese tariffs would also disproportionately impact areas where the majority of people voted for Trump. Nearly two-thirds of all jobs in industries affected by the tariffs reside in Trump-voting counties. Of the 2,010 counties with employment in these industries, 1,722 of them voted for Trump compared to just 288 for Harris.  Overall, the authors say that tariffs—both those implemented by the U.S. as well as foreign retaliation—have real effects on employment in places across the nation, and a continued expansion of protectionism and retaliation is likely to cause substantially more disruption for more American workers.  Read more: https://lnkd.in/eQK6v8my 

America’s energy future—and the economic growth, good jobs, and family well-being that rely on it—calls for effectively expanding a diverse array of domestic power sources, including clean energy, in US communities.     A new Policy Download by Brookings Metro's Xavier de Souza Briggs and the Lincoln Institute's RJ McGrail, copublished by the Lincoln Institute and the What Works Plus funder collaborative, offers a strategic framework and recommendations on how communities can catalyze a new generation of community-scale clean energy projects. These kinds of projects typically have under one megawatt of capacity, and offer families and community-serving institutions valuable energy savings and protection against power outages while also reducing carbon emissions.  Read the Policy Download: https://lnkd.in/gceXiyTf

Creating a better energy future for all Americans—and ensuring economic growth, good jobs, and family well-being comes with reliable, affordable power that is more widely shared—depends on expanding our domestic power sources. This expansion, including clean energy production, needs to reach communities small and large throughout the country. From now on, power production and transmission will no longer be the sole province of big utility companies or engineering firms whose conventional, large-scale production facilities have dominated the US energy sector. Local communities are also now charting new energy production and storage, and “community-scale” clean energy projects, typically under one megawatt of capacity, represent an important ingredient of their new energy future. In a new report, The Brookings Institution's Xavier de Souza Briggs and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's RJ McGrail write that funding and delivering these community-scale projects requires strategically building out a still-nascent market in scalable and accessible ways.  To do so, the authors offer a strategic framework and recommend actions to orient the field from the federal level to the local, and to engage the private, public, and nonprofit sectors around a new North Star goal: a national commitment to building an efficient and effective energy marketplace—including community-scale clean energy production and storage— that serves all regions and communities across the country. Read more: https://lnkd.in/dPYETR3Z 

From 2017 to 2022, Black-owned employer businesses were drivers of economic growth, boosting economies in both red and blue states while providing spillover effects that helped residents of rural and urban areas. Black-owned businesses saw tremendous growth over the period, adding roughly 70,500 new employer firms to the national economy—equivalent to about half of the overall increase. On Thursday, February 20, Brookings Metro will host an event to discuss this growth. @ Andre Perry, senior fellow and director for the Center for Community Uplift at Brookings will also present new data on the impact of investing in Black-owned businesses. Following this, CapEQ President and CEO @ Tynesia Boyea-Robinson will moderate a panel featuring The Burns Brothers Co-Founder @ John Burns and Black Chambers, Inc President and CEO @ Ron Busby, Sr. to discuss how to maintain this momentum in light of changing federal regulations. Register here: https://brook.gs/3WS2yn5

From 2017 to 2022, Black-owned employer businesses were drivers of economic growth, boosting economies in both red and blue states while providing spillover effects that helped residents of rural and urban areas. Black-owned businesses saw tremendous growth over the period, adding roughly 70,500 new employer firms to the national economy—equivalent to about half of the overall increase. Hear from Tynesia Boyea-Robinson of CAP EQ, John Burns of HQ House and Ron Busby, Sr. of U.S. Black Chamber  discuss the factors that led to the rise in Black employers and sharing insights on maintaining this progress for this important The Brookings Institution event. Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/e8-RByfn

Spoke with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today) about this week's on-again, off-again funding freeze, and what it would mean for Tribal communities if it were to go into effect. My take: in its misguided attack on "DEI," the Trump Administration has ended up targeting a lot of programs that are core to the federal government's trust-and-treaty obligations to Tribes. https://lnkd.in/eGCVDJNx

Trump admin threats to clean economy policies are causing confusion and concern. Our The Brookings Institution report digs into state-level impacts for clean and resilient transportation. The upshot: some states are prepared to go it alone, but there are major concerns in SE and Great Plains.   That didn’t take long. In just over a week, multiple Executive Orders threatened to halt federal electrical vehicle programs and critically review other clean economy (or “green new deal”) transportation policies.   The candidate and team told us this would happen, so it’s not surprising—even if it flies in the face of weather-related threats to infrastructure resilience or the enormous market opportunities for American manufacturers and service firms in clean tech. Instead, stakeholders need to start preparing for how states and locals respond to absent federal leadership.   This report assesses how states plan with and without IIJA’s + IRA’s programs. States are enormous climate players: they receive over $18b in direct capital funding, all of which must be informed by long-range planning. To know both where we are and where we could be, Ben Swedberg and I inventoried every state’s climate-focused transportation planning practices.   The results are both promising and concerning. Aided by direct federal support, more states are now producing emissions mitigation and climate resilience plans. However, the historic record also suggests roughly half of these states may revert to less climate-focused planning if federal support recedes. The record is especially worrisome in the Southeastern and Great Plains states.    Based on these findings + work by folks like RMI Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) National League of Cities, we know the planning laws worked; now is the time to fund states to follow-through on those plans. At the same time, states should not rely solely on federal support. States would be especially wise to create a rainy-day capital account that could insure against any reductions in federal fiscal support.   More in the full report, plus an interactive scorecard to see where your state ranks. https://lnkd.in/edZ_VHKt

There is an assumption that the power to shape AI’s impacts rests overwhelmingly in the hands of those at the top of the corporate organization chart, and sometimes the investors who back them, but what if that’s not true? In a new The Brookings Institution publication, Roy E. Bahat says that the talent, or workers, at AI labs have more of an influence on the companies because of their expertise.   Because of their power, AI lab workers will either shape the future of AI to be as safe as possible, or we may have no protection at all, which means, ultimately, they are both society’s first line of defense and its last.  Therefore, if we want to safeguard AI, it’s time to focus a bit less on the boldfaced names leading these companies, and more on the people working at them, Bahat says.  Read more: https://lnkd.in/eWn-TGWD