A Distribution of the Benefits Among States The FY 1987 NASA procurement awards ranked among states on the basis of prime contracts are illustrated in Figure 1 [7]. This figure seems to indicate that the economic benefits of the Space Program are very heavily concentrated in four or five states and that the other 45 or so gain little from NASA procurement spending. Figure 1 indicates that five states - California, Texas, Florida, Maryland, and Alabama - receive 70 percent of the NASA procurement spending, and that the remainder is distributed in relatively insignificant amounts to all the other states. This is the conventional wisdom: the economic benefits of expenditures for the U.S. Space Program flow primarily to only a few regions of the nation and most states gain little from this spending. However, this impression is incorrect. As we demonstrate below, the economic benefits of the Space Program are widely distributed throughout the nation, and among of the biggest state "winners" are many that few perceive as being closely tied to the Program. Table 4 shows the (direct plus indirect) economic and employment effects of the 1987 NASA procurement budget on every state. This table clearly demonstrates that in terms of industry sales and jobs every state benefits substantially from the U.S. Space Program: cutbacks in the Program would harm businesses and cause unemployment within every state, and expansions in the Program would benefit every state. These data are significant, for they refute the widespread notion that the NASA budget benefits four or five states at the expense of the rest of the nation. However, even these data are difficult to interpret and in one sense obscure relevant information, and to further assess the state-specific benefits and their distributions we have developed three additional rankings shown in Table 5: column 1 ranks the states on the basis of total industry sales generated by NASA procurement, column 2 ranks the top 20 states on the basis of the per capita employment created by the Space Program, and column 3 ranks the top 20 states on the basis of the economic benefits created indirectly within each state by the Space Program. Focussing first on column 1 of Table 5, it is observed that in terms of total sales generated the prime contract states of California, Texas, Florida, Maryland, and Alabama still clearly dominate. This is to be expected, since the total economic benefits are the sum of the direct benefits and the indirect benefits. What is interesting here, however, is that some states are beginning to emerge as "winners," even though they receive little direct NASA procurement funds. These states include New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Colorado, and Indiana. Column 2 of Table 5 ranks the states on the basis of the employment created (directly and indirectly) by NASA procurement, normalized by the state’s labor force. This is an important evaluation criterion, for it indicates how relatively important the jobs created (listed in Table 4) are in relation to the number of workers in the state. Obviously, a given number of jobs created in a small state such as Wyoming or New Hampshire are much more significant to the state than the
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