Metropolitan Cities Drive North American Trade
If auto manufacturing were a country, it would be the 6th largest economy. China is now the global leader in production, but Detroit is the undisputed capital of innovation and production in the North American auto industry.
Every year, the United States trades over $3.65 billion in motor vehicles and parts with Canada, and over $5 billion with Mexico. Most of these transactions are among pairs of North American metropolitan trading partners, a story that plays out across other advanced manufacturing industries such as aerospace and electronics.
Metropolitan hubs form the backbone of supply chain and co-production platforms of North American advanced manufacturing. Explore this data set to see which pairs of cities trade the most and which manufacturing industries are the most integrated in North America.
Read the full report by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
Andrea Durkin is the Editor-in-Chief of TradeVistas and Founder of Sparkplug, LLC. She is a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and an adjunct fellow with CSIS. Ms. Durkin previously served as a U.S. Government trade negotiator and has proudly taught International Trade for the last fourteen years as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service program.
