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1997 Industry Outlook
Most encouraging, both statistical and anecdotal evidence indicates that the state continues to broaden its economic foundation beyond the traditional reliance on agriculture, tourism and retirement. Many of the sectors humming the loudest are the ones that seem to promise the best jobs for the future: technology, international trade and export-oriented manufacturing, among others.
Florida still has a ways to go. For example: While the state was second among nine southeastern states in the total value of its exports in 1995, it was seventh in exports per capita. What this means is that too many of the state's workers are involved in the service sector and too few in making products for sale elsewhere. A few important questions that loom large in 1997:
Can Enterprise Florida land a silicon wafer manufacturing facility and give the state a broader and more respectable high-tech base? [FT, Nov. 1996] Will the state stumble trying to put together a high-speed rail system? [FT, Feb. 1996] And, perhaps most significant, will these good times give way to a national recession, as some doomsayers predict?
More problematic is a longer-term issue that economist Lester Thurow describes as one of the "tectonic plates" that will produce "economic earthquakes" in the coming decades: the aging of the population and its demands on the country's budget. It is, of course, a subject of special concern to Florida.
It is fiscally inevitable that the U.S. will have to shrink the proportion of the federal budget going to the elderly during the next decade. How politicians will address this explosive issue, when the elderly will constitute a majority of the voting population by 2005, is problematic to say the least.
If a serious discussion of entitlements begins to evolve during the Clinton administration's second term, it will have enormous implications for Florida. Nearly 20% of the state's population is elderly - the largest proportion of any state - and they contribute to its vast (unearned) income base.
For the moment, however, 1997 appears to hold both promise and drama. And Floridians can take some comfort inthefact that amid so much challenge, there appears to be so much opportunity.
