MinnEcon Blog

A decade of winners, losers in Minnesota manufacturing

Minnesota's lost about 20 percent of its manufacturing employment the last decade, roughly 80, 000 jobs.

Dig deeper, though, and there's a more complex story to tell.

Some manufacturing sectors are growing, thanks to the region's medical device industry. On the flip side, whatever computer manufacturing business the state had at the start of the 2000s is largely gone now.

We got a look recently at the decade's winners and losers in manufacturing thanks to research from Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., an Idaho-based consulting group that likes data as much as we do.

When EMSI posted recently on the "50 Manufacturing Sectors That GREW Over The Past 10 Years," we asked them if they'd crunch similar data for us for Minnesota. They did.

There are hundreds of manufacturing categories. You can find the full Minnesota data set here.

Here are the 20 biggest categories of winners...

... and losers

The federally collected data are broken down using the North American Industry Classification System. EMSI's Josh Wright notes that the 2011 job numbers "are better described as estimates right now because of the time lag with certain federal/state sources."

You can certainly see the growing importance of the region's medical device companies and ethanol plants over the decade along with the drop in jobs tied to the home building industry.

Take a look at post something below or drop us a line directly if something drops out at you.

Despite the hit, manufacturing still drives about 11 percent of the state's employment.

Source: Joint Economic Committee