Grant will fund multi-university research on impact of reshoring on U.S. economy

Dr. Michael Anderson is co-principal investigator of a study about the impact of reshoring on the U.S. economy.

Michael Mercier | UAH

The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) received a grant to study the impact of reshoring on transportation infrastructure and the U.S. economy. Dr. Michael Anderson, an associate professor in UAH's Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, is a co-principal investigator on the project, which also includes researchers from the University of Memphis, the University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Reshoring is the returning of manufacturing and assembly jobs to the United States. These are jobs that were moved overseas over the past 40 years that are starting to return to the U.S.," says Dr. Anderson. "The goal of reshoring is to reduce the overall cost of items by reducing the costs associated with shipping final products."

The project encompasses several tasks that the researchers will tackle over the course of its 17-month duration. These include developing a reshorability index for U.S. manufacturing companies, determining the sensitivity of reshorability to policy changes, analyzing the impact of reshoring on the transportation network, creating manufacturing location quotients, assessing the potential economic impact, and devising policy recommendations.

"UAH's portion of the grant, which is $28,425, will be used to examine the location of reshoring activities and distribution of products in the U.S. We will be instrumental in modeling the impact of reshoring activities on the nation's transportation infrastructure," says Dr. Anderson. "We hope to demonstrate and identify locations where transportation infrastructure will be a hindrance to reshoring activities."