Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The Econo

Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The Economist ran an excellent piece a few weeks back contrasting Scranton, PA and Greenville, SC. The latter was able to re-invent itself by attracting BMW to build a plant there, which saw them out of their catch-22. PA, despite offering billions in subsidies over the years has had no such luck. https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21730406-what-can-be-done-help-them-globalisation-has-marginalised-many-regions-rich-world https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21730406-what-can-be... However, exactly how to do this is still uncertain: > South Carolina has not become an all-purpose manufacturing powerhouse. In fact, manufacturing employment is lower in the region than it was when BMW set up shop. But real incomes are growing and the population is booming. Greenville is 70% bigger than it was in 1990. > Its success shows the value of co-ordination. There is a chicken-and-egg problem in establishing a cluster. Firms would like to be where there are workers, suppliers and infrastructure; workers want places where firms are already offering good new jobs. Neither will go where the other isn’t. But action on a number of fronts can, under the right circumstances, attract both at once, creating a kernel round which a cluster can grow large enough to become self-sustaining. After that, it may well invigorate other areas of the local economy. > Strategies which build clusters through such two-way seduction are hard to assess.