Middle States Geographer, 1999,32: 11-17 DETERMINANTS OF US REGIONS ' CAPITAL GOODS EXPORT PERFORMANCE

ABSTRACT: The bulk of us manufactures exports are capital goods (S1C35, S1C36, SIC 37 less SIC371, and S1C38). By 1995 the share of us capital goods production that was exported reached 45o/r, up from less than 30% in 1985. During that time, the share of manufacturing output in US GD? fell below 200/<-. down more than 9 percentage points. Thus, while the manufacturing sector has declined as whole, there has been an important shift toward capital goods production, especially for export markets. This shift has been uneven across US regions in terms ofboth intensity and timing. Export performance is directly tied to the productivity of inputs. This paper tests for differences across six US regions in the determinants of capital goods export performance. A standard Ricardian export model is extended to directly estimate the relationship between regions ' capital goods exports and the productivity of labor and capital in capital goods production. Results are inconsistent across regions in terms of the signs and significance offactors determining capital goods export performance. Alternative explanations for this are considered after a discussion of results for two regions with similar capital goods export profiles and reversed signs for significant coefficients. Those results are discussed in terms of regional differences in firms ' business investment and joint-production strategies for meeting expected demand, especially for computer hardware and telecommunications and instrument controls. that of every other export category each year since 1987 (Warner, 1994). More than one-half of the fifty leading US industrial exporters are capital goods Capital goods exports-industrial machinery an