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Articles by Greg Wright
What’s Working in America’s Workforce System?
The American workforce is undergoing rapid changes driven by demographic shifts, technological advancements, and evolving skill requirements. During this time of rapid disruption, the question arises: How can our training programs and workforce development systems do a better job of supporting workers and employers to meet their skill and employment needs?
Planning for prosperity: Analyzing the effectiveness of local economic planning
Economic development planning is meant to provide a roadmap to guide policymakers toward greater economic well-being and quality of life in a region. This report explores the effectiveness of planners in achieving these objectives. To do this, we use natural language processing to characterize the text of several hundred economic development plans and ask two primary questions.
Which US states and occupations are most in need of foreign-born labor?
Immigrants comprise nearly 20% of the American workforce. Their share of the workforce has grown steadily over the last 15 years and more rapidly since 2020 as immigrants have returned to work more quickly post COVID-19 than their U.S.-born colleagues. While the U.S. economy increasingly relies on the labor that immigrants provide, immigrants have not driven U.S.-born workers from the labor market.
Making the most of the energy transition: How the Great Lakes can identify priority industries and overcome workforce challenges
Executive summary As the world continues to decarbonize, demand for clean energy technologies is taking off. This presents a historic opportunity for state and local governments to harness this demand to generate equitable and sustainable local economic growth.
Industrial policy will require immigration reform
The CHIPS and Science Act has set the stage for a boom in U.S. semiconductor production. But a looming question threatens the development of the industry: Are there enough workers with sector-specific skills to support it? Currently, targeted educational programs are doing much of the heavy lifting to build the semiconductor workforce, but they will not be enough.
A roadmap for immigration reform
The last time the U.S. enacted major immigration reform was the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Since then, little has been done to fix what has become a broken system despite heated debate at the national, state, and local levels. Unfortunately, the immigration debate has also become increasingly disconnected from the exigencies of the U.S. economy, even in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in which worker shortages and labor market dysfunction have become increasingly glaring.
What works in workforce development-and how can it work better?
For the past two years, a bipartisan group of researchers and analysts convened by the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Project on Workforce has reviewed the evidence on the effectiveness of the United States’ federal-state workforce education and training system. Our group—the Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI)—has reached some surprising and hopefully useful conclusions about how our nation can improve its investments in job training.
Virginia’s big bet on tech talent is working. Other regions are watching closely and taking notes.
There is ample evidence that talent considerations have come to dominate the selection criteria of companies when deciding where to place job-creating business investments. For instance, “availability of skilled labor” has climbed to first on the list of factors companies care about most when making their site-selection decisions.
Pakistan’s economic crisis
The 2022 year saw political turmoil, an economic crisis, and catastrophic flooding in Pakistan. On the economic front, the country has been dealing with backbreaking inflation, a depreciating currency, and precariously low foreign reserves. As Pakistan looks to address these challenges in a turbulent moment, important questions arise as to the long-term roots of these problems, how political instability shapes them, and what economic policy Pakistan should adopt to address its difficulties.
Introducing the Smart Growth Cities tool
Economic and workforce development are two of the leading priorities for policymakers at the local level, but they are notoriously difficult to get right. The cities and regions that do find success in generating both economic growth and an upwardly mobile workforce typically achieve this success by building on their local capabilities.
The immigrant workforce supports millions of US jobs
Dozens of empirical studies have found that immigration benefits American workers. Even immigrant workers with little formal education have, with some exceptions, been found to have negligible effects on the wages of similarly educated workers. As part of Brookings Workforce of the Future initiative’s ongoing efforts to identify immigration policies that benefit American workers, we present a new perspective on the role that immigrants play in the U.S. economy.
Smarter immigration policies could help alleviate the semiconductor shortage
From semiconductors to infant formula, U.S. consumers are facing acute shortages of essential goods. Ironically, both global and anti-global forces are behind this current disruption in supply chain.
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