International trade supports 1 million Virginia jobs

Published April 9, 2019 by Veronica Garabelli

A Business Roundtable study found that international trade supports 1.054 million jobs in Virginia, or one out of five positions.

Business Roundtable is made up of U.S. CEOs of major corporations. The organization supports congressional passage of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a free trade agreement to replace NAFTA.

Trade with Canada and Mexico alone supports 329,100 jobs in Virginia, according to the report. Exports from Virginia to Canada and Mexico have increased by 227 percent since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the study said.

The study – prepared by Trade Partnership Worldwide with the latest-available employment data from 2017 – examines the net impacts of both exports and imports of goods and services on U.S. jobs in all 50 states.
It also compared 2017 data to pre-NAFTA data from 1992. The study found that trade-supported jobs in Virginia increased by 94 percent from 1992 (when NAFTA was implemented) to 2017 – four times faster than total employment.

The study also revealed that Virginia exported $6.1 billion in goods and services to Canada and Mexico in 2017 and that goods and services exports account for 6.5 percent of Virginia’s total GDP.