Rhode Island is an old state and a small state. There is not ample room for natural resource extraction or constructing new communities in the wilderness. This is not Texas. Yet when thinking about economics, Rhode Islanders compare their state to such places and ask, “What are we doing wrong in Rhode Island that prevents us from growing like them?”
The relative ease with which the Great Plains have weathered the Great Recession mirrors in some ways the relative ease with which Alberta and Australia have weathered the Great Recession. Commodity prices have increased significantly over the last decade. Places that produce oil, wheat, corn, metals and other commodities have fared well.
Commodities are not primary drivers of the Rhode Island economy. Local agriculture is real and remains important. But it will never be on the scale of rural states — there are farms in Kansas the size of Providence County. Fossil fuel production and mining are almost nonexistent here. Comparing the Ocean State to vast open lands that produce commodities makes little sense.
What Rhode Island does have is a spot in the Boston-Washington corridor. What the people of Rhode Island have is a coastal piece of real estate within a four-hour drive of 32 million people, top world universities and the headquarters of a quarter of America’s largest 500 corporations.
Rhode Island has a long cultural history of maritime and industrial trades. The very bones of our cities and the infrastructure of our state were built with these purposes in mind. Hulking brick factories and sprawling seaports and rail yards compose much of the landscape to this day. The question is whether Rhode Island’s location, history and infrastructure will be suitable for use in the future.
Unfortunately, some things are beyond a state’s control. For decades, Rhode Island has seen manufacturing jobs slip away at an alarming rate. Just over 50 percent of the state’s manufacturing jobs disappeared in the last 20 years. Then, in 2013, something surprising happened. For the first time in over a generation there were more manufacturing jobs than the year before. In fact, the downward trend had pretty much leveled off by 2010.
But something else surprising happened in 2013. In President Obama’s State of the Union Address, he announced that talks would begin on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Called T-TIP, this is a NAFTA-style trade agreement between the United States and the European Union. Regardless of one’s opinion on the efficacy of bilateral trade agreements, this would be the biggest one ever. As such, it is not something for state leaders to take lightly.
Talks began this July. Barely anybody noticed. Yet with an aggressive timetable set to attempt to complete a deal by Nov. 1, 2014, before the next European Commission takes office, a new reality in transatlantic trade could be approaching in just over a year. There are as many people within 200 miles of Providence as within the entire country of Canada. The state has two ports set 140 miles to the east of the Port of New York that don’t require complicated guidance through Long Island Sound. And for the first time in decades, Rhode Island has a manufacturing industry in which both wages and jobs are growing. This is not a bad spot to be if transatlantic trade is going to increase.
State politicians have very little power when compared to the European Commission and the White House. They cannot change this. The only question left is, “Can we position Rhode Island to better ride this wave?” Today we are in the middle of a sea of change in the Ocean State. With the I-195 corridor moved, Rhode Islanders gained a once-in-a-generation opportunity to develop 22 acres of downtown land in Providence. The first ever lease of federal waters — over 150,000 acres — to a private wind farm developer just occurred this summer off our shores. Land is being sold at Quonset Point.
The world is moving all around us. We fret about our state’s unemployment rate and rightfully so. But who remembers that the rate was 2.5 percent below the national average in 1988? It is 1.3 percent above the national average today. It is amazing how infrequently these numbers are recalled 25 years later. Yet the buildings we build, the infrastructure we develop and the policies we set forth endure.
In 2014, the gubernatorial race will begin to dominate local media. This will be an excellent opportunity for public debate. Rhode Islanders should be careful not to use this opportunity exclusively to look inward, find faults and focus on the short term. We need our leaders to have vision. We all need to help develop that vision. We need to move beyond managing decline.
Daniel Carrigg GS can be reached at daniel_carrigg@brown.edu.
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