Five Market ‐​Oriented Policies to Help the U.S. Semiconductor Industry

Scott LincicomeWith Congress still considering a $50 billion-plus subsidy package for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing, I ’ve discussed themany(many)reasonswhy such subsides are costly and unnecessary, as well as theignominious history of similar industrial policies in the United States. This doesn ’t mean, however, that the U.S. government should simply do nothing. Instead, there are many horizontal, pro-market policy reforms that would deliver substantial benefits to chipmakers and other capital-intensive advanced manufacturers in the United States while avoiding U.S. industrial policy’s common pitfalls – picking losers, politicization, economic costs (seen and unseen), etc. Here are my Top 5:Expand immigrationAs Cato scholars have frequentlyexplained, educated immigrants boost U.S. innovation and productivity and disproportionatelybenefit the U.S. semiconductor industry and related ecosystem. Approximately 40 percent of high-skilled semiconductor workers in the United States were born abroad (most come from India and China), and 87 percent of semiconductor patents awarded to top U.S. universities in 2011 had at least one foreign-born investor. International students comprise two-thirds of graduate students in the top fields feeding into the U.S. semiconductor industry, and roughly 80 percent of international PhD graduates in these fieldsstay in the country after finishing their degrees (stay rates are at around 90 percent for Chinese and Indian PhD graduates).Surel...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs