The northern Front Range is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest seaport, but it is vulnerable to changing U.S. trade agreements and a potential global trade war.
Denver, Boulder and Greeley, while not as heavily dependent on exports as other U.S. cities, won’t be insulated from trade disruptions, according to an analysis from the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, a nonprofit public policy organization.
“Lots of places of different types have a stake in this national debate,” said Mark Muro, a policy director at the program. “Trade is sometimes viewed as a global, national topic. But it hits home in varied places.”
The Boulder metropolitan statistical area, which includes all of Boulder County, has the heaviest reliance on trade of any metro area in Colorado at 12 percent of its economic output in 2015.
Exports of both goods and services accounted for about $2.7 billion in activity and supported 14,570 jobs, including 7,100 direct jobs in 2015. Out of the seven Colorado metro areas included in the analysis, Boulder was the only one to rank in the top third nationally for trade dependency, coming in at 123rd out of the 380 metro areas.
Medical devices represent Colorado’s largest goods export category; electronics is the second largest category. Boulder is a player in both areas, said Karen Gerwitz, president of World Trade Center Denver.
Louisville, for example, is home to a unit of global medical device giant Medtronic. But Gerwitz said services also play a big role in Boulder’s exports; it is home to a variety of consultants, engineers and other experts.
If a Boulder hydrologist jumps on a plane to provide advice about a water treatment plant in China, his or her efforts count as an export. And the money the University of Colorado Boulder collects from international students qualifies as an export, Gerwitz said.
Not far behind Boulder County for global dependency is Greeley and surrounding Weld County, which has a concentration of meat packing plants and other food processors.
Exports accounted for just under $1.5 billion, or 11.2 percent, of the Weld County economy and supported 8,781 jobs, including 3,716 direct jobs in 2015, according to Brookings.
“Everything has been flipped on its ear,” said Richard Werner, president and CEO of the economic development group Upstate Colorado. “You will see more of these singular treaties with individual countries. We are hopeful that those work out.”
Dairy farmers in Weld County, for example, were looking forward to greater access to Japan under the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, but President Donald Trump quashed the agreement in one of his first moves in office.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton promised to do the same, so the deal essentially was dead in the water. But the administration wants to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement and other pacts in an effort to reduce the country’s trade imbalance and encourage the return of manufacturing jobs to the U.S.
“There is no precedent in modern times for a new administration promptly tossing out a major trade agreement and announcing it will renegotiate,” David Levy, an economist with the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, said in a commentary.
Supporters of opening up NAFTA argue the agreement is 23 years old and needs to be refreshed. One concern is that if negotiations go badly, international trade could suffer, resulting in higher prices on imported goods and fewer exports.
“If the result looks like a trade war, it will cause disruption, add to uncertainty and broadly depress investment throughout the global economy,” Levy cautioned.
More than 100 importers, including Walmart, Nike and Best Buy, have banded together to form Americans for Affordable Products and fight any new taxes or levies on goods coming into the country.
An early test, Werner said, will come on Feb. 10, when President Trump and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe start face-to-face trade talks.
Muro said trade disruptions would hurt urban and rural communities across the country. Indiana, which has four of the top six most trade-dependent metro areas in the country, voted 57 percent in favor of Trump, similar to the margin he carried in Weld County.
Boulder County voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton, who also carried most of the metro Denver counties (notably, not Douglas County).
With just under $14 billion in exports, metro Denver accounted for about 60 percent of exports coming out of Colorado’s metro areas in 2015. That trade supported 94,563 jobs, including 51,024 direct jobs.
But metro Denver on the whole is less dependent on exports. Exports represent 7.8 percent of the metro economy, ranking Denver 279th out of 380 metro areas, according to Brookings.
The least trade-dependent economies in Colorado are Grand Junction and Colorado Springs, which had 6.7 percent and 6.1 percent of their economic output linked to exports.
Across the state’s seven metro areas, exports accounted for $22.6 billion in economic activity and supported 144,775 jobs, including 75,140 direct jobs, according to Brookings.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
