ECONOMY: INDUSTRY
American industry maintains a position of absolute importance thanks above all to the high technological level, which makes it possible to compensate for the competition exercised by emerging countries with low labor costs. Indeed, in the last years of the twentieth century, the high tech sector (primarily the computer industry) was the real engine of US growth, contributing approx. 30% to the increase in gross domestic product. Conversely, the basic branches and the automotive industry itself (in which the US has long dominated the world scene) have gone through a phase of reconversion in many ways common to industrialized countries, in others made more problematic by the organizational peculiarities of some large groups in the United States: in particular, General Motors, due to trade union opposition to production relocation projects, experienced moments of dramatic crisis in 1998, which resulted in a contraction that affected both production plants and production plants in the early 2000s. the jobs of workers in the sector, which decreased in the order of tens of thousands. Overall, the secondary sector has experienced a sharp downsizing of its incidence on total GDP in the last thirty years, almost exclusively to the benefit of the tertiary sector, a trait that characterizes the United States as one of the countries with a post-industrial economy. United States is a country located in North America according to FRANCISCOGARDENING.COM.
However, the basic industry continues to cover, within the steel industry, a sector of fundamental production capacity (almost 100 million tonnes of steel in 2005, making the United States the third largest producer in the world), although in sharp decline compared to last decades of the twentieth century; the major centers of the steel industry are located in the northern Appalachian area (Pittsburgh remains the “capital of steel”, but the sites in Indiana, Ohio and Illinois are also important), rich in coal and easily accessible by river from the Great Lakes region, where iron ores abound; the steel industry is also well represented in the lakeside port centers, favorably located compared to the ferrous deposits (Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Chicago etc.); while the colossal Atlantic plants of Sparrows Point near Baltimore, Morrisville, Bethlehem etc are fed with mineral generally imported; the southern Appalachian steel industry is concentrated in Alabama (Bessemer, Birmingham), to which are added some centers scattered throughout the country, mainly based on local needs, such as Houston in Texas, Pueblo in Colorado etc.
The other metallurgical productions are very important, for many of which the US leadership is very marked, in particular for aluminum (of which the country is the fourth largest producer in the world), whose numerous processing centers are located both in a good position with respect to US mines (such as Alcoa in Tennessee), and in import ports, especially for bauxite from South America (Mobile in Alabama, Baton Rouge in Louisiana, etc.), where only the first smelting is generally carried out, while further refining takes place very often in centers in the North-West (Wenatchee in Washington State, etc.). The United States also excel in the metallurgy of copper, which also makes use of some imported minerals, with gigantic foundries to Anaconda (Montana), Morenci (Arizona) etc., and lead, with foundries in Kellogg (Idaho), Tooele (Utah) etc. Other main metallurgical processes are those of zinc and magnesium. The mechanical industry has achieved an unparalleled development and, despite today registering a certain saturation of some sectors, it continues its expansion: in a certain sense this is the industry that has had the greatest impact on the entire economy, not to say on the kind of life of the United States. It is located especially in the Great Lakes region, where the main industrial pole is represented by Chicago, placed at the service of the entire vast internal agricultural region, and in the north-central Atlantic belt. In the first Industrial Belt heavy mechanics and the automotive sector (with Detroit as its capital) predominate, fueling a considerable induced activity. Here they are located the Ford, the Chrysler and General Motors. In the last decades of the twentieth century, however, the entire automotive sector had to contend with Asian competition in two areas, that of car and tire manufacturing, which saw the United States outclassed by Japan and China, respectively. In the second Industrial Belt, instead, there are a series of plants producing railway material (Philadelphia), agricultural machinery, textiles (Worcester, Massachusetts) and printing presses, electrical equipment (motors of all kinds), televisions and radios, household appliances, optical instruments, cameras (Rochester) etc.
The naval industry has its traditional centers in the Atlantic ports (Sparrows Point, Quincy near Boston etc.), on the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico (Mobile, Pascagoula etc.) and the Pacific (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco) and on the Great Lakes. However, it has suffered a very sharp drop in production, above all due to competition from other maritime countries, in particular Japan and South Korea.
