The initial strength of the rebound in manufacturing after the Great Recession has cooled off in recent years.1 Although limited, the available data so far for 2017 indicates that there may be some renewed momentum for growth. Additionally, a monthly survey of manufacturers indicates that the sector is growing.
However, the U.S. manufacturing sector is made up of many industries that produce goods as diverse as food products, automobiles, furniture, and refined petroleum products and the performance of these industries has varied considerably.
This report presents some of the latest data available and explores recent historical trends for the manufacturing sector as a whole and for its industries.
At the request of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) of the Department of Commerce (DOC) conducted an assessment of the EB-5 program to determine its size and its contribution to the U.S. economy. To accomplish this, we examined individual projects that were active during a two-year period, FY2012 and FY2013, and compiled a new dataset that includes the number of EB-5 projects, the number of investors, the amount of EB-5 and non-EB-5 related investment spending and the resulting expected1 job creation.
In 2014, President Obama set out an ambitious goal to double the number of apprenticeships to 750,000 by the end of 2018, and to diversify them as well. This year the half million mark was passed. However, despite their increasing popularity and proven benefit to workers, apprenticeships are not fully understood in the United States, especially from the point of view of U.S. employers. The skilled trades that support our nation’s construction industry still represent the core of American apprenticeships, but many other industries, like health care and information technology (IT), are adopting apprenticeships to create a skilled workforce for jobs they cannot otherwise fill easily, if at all. Along the way, firms are not only starting apprenticeships in new occupations and industries but also opening doors for women and minorities.
Innovation and creative endeavors are indispensable elements that drive economic growth and sustain the competitive edge of the U.S. economy. The last century recorded unprecedented improvements in the health, economic well-being, and overall quality of life for the entire U.S. population.1 As the world leader in innovation, U.S. companies have relied on intellectual prop- erty (IP) as one of the leading tools with which such advances were promoted and realized. Pat- ents, trademarks, and copyrights are the principal means for establishing ownership rights to the creations, inventions, and brands that can be used to generate tangible economic benefits to their owner.
The United States remains an attractive destination for foreign direct investment (FDI) for a variety of reasons, including a large consumer base, a productive workforce, a highly innovative environment, and legal protections. As a result, foreign firms make investments in the United States on a regular basis by establishing new operations, purchasing existing operations of another company, or providing additional capital to their existing U.S. operations. This report, which updates a report released in 2013, examines recent trends in FDI and highlights newly released “greenfield” FDI data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).1 Foreign direct investment trends identified in the earlier report have continued to 2015. 
Increasingly, consumers and independent service providers are engaging in transactions facilitated by an Internet-based platform. The digital firms that provide the platforms are often collectively referred to as belonging to the "sharing" or "collaborative" economies, among other descriptors.
