The importance of manufacturing to the economy and, in particular, manufacturing exporters – and the growing wedge between our export performance and foreign demand – led the Bank to dig a little deeper to better understand the dynamics of what’s happening. To do that, we broke down the non-energy export sector into 31 subsectors and investigated at this more detailed level.
We are discovering that, for many of these subsectors, exports have been behaving broadly in line with the fundamentals of foreign activity – or even better. For them, business is heating up. Subsectors that are expected to thrive as U.S. investment picks up include machinery and equipment, building materials, commercial services, and aircraft and aircraft parts.