R&D production in the United States: Rethinking the Snowbelt–Sunbelt shift

Abstract

The Frostbelt–Sunbelt shift in the US, which is thought to have accelerated during the 1970s, corresponds with recent findings that invention and innovation in the Southern and Western parts of the country have come to rival the traditional manufacturing belt. Whether research and development (R&D), a key input to new technology, shows a similar pattern is the focus of this study. It is found, that there was a shift in R&D activity to the Sunbelt during some decades, but not all, and that the manufacturing belt has maintained a slight R&D lead in the country. Still, parts of the Sunbelt rivalled the Northeast for R&D already in 1963. Thus, any national shift in the location of R&D must have occurred prior to the 1960s and before it might be thought to have happened. In the US, R&D production associates well with places that have an educated, professional, and technically specialized labor force. Those states that continue to build on these and similar techno-societal conditions will arguably be in a better position to grow.

Notes

1 Defined by Scott and Storper (1987), locational windows of opportunity are temporally and spatially distinct opportunities for new and emerging industries that are derived from new products and processes and enable key firms to locate beyond traditional centers of innovation and industry. The most prevalent and more recent examples of this phenomena includes Microsoft's decision to locate beyond Silicon Valley. However, Storper and Walker (1989) demonstrate that location windows have long existed and illustrate this with shifts in textile production from the northeast to the southeast. As a result of Storper and Walker's (1989) understanding of territorial industrialization and existence of locational windows of opportunity, a great amount of literature emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s emphasizing the product cycle (i.e., Malecki, 1991), world product mandate facilities or variations on it, such as Scott's (1988) “Outward-Downward-Across” elucidation on the capacity for regions (or more accurately firms) to develop new space liberating products or processes that escape the dynamics of the product cycle.