Houston still No. 1 city for trade in U.S.; 70k jobs added in past year | Houston Public Media

Houston’s job growth is slowing down compared to two years ago.

That’s according to the Greater Houston Partnership. Every year the GHP looks into Houston’s global economy, offering insight into the region’s major trading partners and trends affecting the area’s international trade.

Senior VP of Research Patrick Jankowski joined Houston Matters on Friday and said that the city is still doing well, despite the slowdown. The city added around 70,000 jobs in the last 12 months, he said.

“That’s lower than what we did last year,” Jankowski said. “Last year we had 102,000. We are slowing but we are still growing.”

The rates are closer to pre-pandemic years, he added.

“What we’re doing is returning to normal after all these years and months, we are back to normal.”

In the Houston area, about $175 billion in trade happens, which makes it the number one city in the U.S. for shipping and trading. Jankowski said for Houstonians, this means jobs.

“If we did not export as much as we had, we would not have as robust an economy and we would not have as many jobs in the region,” he said.

Houston’s biggest trade partners are China and Mexico, Jankowski said.

“They actually flip flop every now and then, one year it’s Mexico, the next year it’s China and then it goes back and forth,” he said. “But the top five are: China, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Korea and Brazil.”

Among the top 20 are Colombia, Chile, Thailand, and Germany.

Some of the major exports from Houston include crude and refined products, steel, industrial equipment, electrical equipment, plastics and chemicals.

“And we still export agricultural products,” he said. “Agricultural products aren’t necessarily growing around here, but I was surprised to see that if you look at what goes out by containers, among the top 10 exports are … cotton.”

While trade is part of it, there’s also direct foreign investment. In 2023, 52 countries overseas announced that companies headquartered in other countries would have operations in Houston, whether through a warehouse, office, research and development or service center.

“Last year we saw an awful lot of companies that would be in alternative energy,” he said. “I also saw a number of life sciences companies. … They’re coming to Houston because of the engineering talent, and they’re coming to Houston because we already have a very large life science and healthcare sector here.”

Houston also has about 1.7 million foreign-born citizens, about 1 in 4 Houstonians. That number surprised him, Jankowski said.

“As an economy of roughly $600 billion, foreign-born workers, their output, their contribution to the GDP is about $200 billion; that’s huge,” Jankowski said. “The other thing is when you look at some of the countries that we trade with, we actually trade more with Vietnam than we do with Saudi Arabia, and we actually trade more with Ecuador than we do with Australia and that was a surprise to me.”

One of Houston’s greatest strengths is the port and the companies based in the area. But the area’s weakness is infrastructure.

“It’s great to see what the ports are doing, what the airports have done, but we still need to do some investment in our roads and our freeways,” he said. “You can get it to the port, but you’ve got to get it from the port onto a flatbed of some sort, and haul it out or bring it in.”