Study: New Jersey needs focus on logistical future

Study: New Jersey needs focus on logistical future Two Rutgers University economists said New Jersey needs to have “a stronger public policy focus on the state’s logistical future.”
   In a study titled New Jersey Logistical Competitiveness: Ominous Trendlines, James W. Hughes and Joseph Seneca said that while warehousing and logistics benefited from a surge in global trade and consumer spending since 2000, “the end of an era of cheap global credit and the beginning of broad consumer retrenchment in the United States will certainly slow this dynamic, and perhaps even shift it into reverse.”
   They also said there has been an “erosion of New Jersey’s logistical workforce at a time when the equivalent workforces in Pennsylvania and the United States have been growing quite briskly in response to the surge in global trade and consumer spending.
   “Employment in logistics, which encompasses the wholesale trade, and transportation and warehousing sectors of the economy, consisted of 390,700 jobs in 2007, or 9.5 percent of the state’s total employment,” they said, and 10.9 percent of the state’s gross domestic product or about $49.6 billion. Logistical jobs are generally high paying, averaging $59,034 per year, 14.3 percent than the average annual pay in the state.
   But they said New Jersey appears to losing competitiveness to other transportation and distribution centers. From 2003 to 2007, New Jersey lost 4,700 jobs or 1.2 percent of its logistics workforce while logistics employment nationally grew 7.9 percent during the same time frame.
   “Pennsylvania, a key competitor, grew by 33,800 jobs between 2003 and 2007, an increase of 8 percent,” the report said. “In an even more ominous trend, logistics employment in the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, Pa.-N.J. metropolitan statistical area, which straddles the Delaware River and Interstate Route 78, grew by 22.8 percent between 2003 and 2007, nearly triple the growth rate for Pennsylvania as a whole!” All that growth, the report said, took place in three Pennsylvania counties.
   “This stands as a stark warning of the stagnation of New Jersey’s competitive logistical position, and the western migration of logistical activity and workforce across the Delaware River,” they added.