Corporate Executive Survey Commentary: Midwest Benefits From Its Manufacturing Heritage
Sweeping changes in tax codes and business regulations, as well as investment in infrastructure and the work force have put the Midwest back on site selectors’ maps.
Q1 2015
Over the last couple of years, governors of the Midwest States recognized their strength was not just purely locational, but also that they had a longstanding manufacturing heritage. They recognized that a return to being the heart and soul of manufacturing would only come with sweeping changes in the respective state tax codes, modifications of business regulations, improved highway infrastructure, and measures for growing and improving their existing skilled workforce. Over the past couple of years the Midwest States have come back. The hard work has paid off.
To sustain this growth, the Midwest is going to have to continue to listen to corporate occupiers and respond to their needs. They are going to have to find ways to work with community partners to make more land and buildings available near population centers with skilled workforces. The hard work has just begun. The Midwest must continue to trend in a positive direction. The Midwest must recognize what the South has recognized for a long time, that economic development is not a sprint but rather a marathon. Hopefully another region will join the lead pack next year, so corporations can start to believe in an economic recovery.
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Bradley Migdal, Senior Managing Director, Business Incentives Practice, Cushman & Wakefield, Inc.
Brad Midgal is a senior managing director - Business Incentives for Cushman & Wakefield’s Global Occupier Services (GOS) division. As such, he specializes in corporate engagements involving site selection and negotiating state and local economic development incentives. Migdal has more than 10 years of experience managing corporate site selection engagements, business incentives projects, and economic development consulting assignments. His expertise is in the areas of domestic site selection and location analysis, economic incentives research and acquisitions, and demonstrating the economic and fiscal impacts of a wide variety of projects to both corporations and governments. He specializes in working with state agencies and local municipalities in connection with negotiating incentive packages and developing corporate attraction strategies. Migdal came to Cushman & Wakefield from Transwestern, where he was most recently executive managing director of Location Advisory Consulting. He also acted as managing director in NGKF’s Global Corporate Services Consulting practice and acted as a manager with both PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Credits & Incentives Network Practice and Deloitte Tax LLP, in its Credit and Incentives Practice. Prior to that, Migdal practiced law in Chicago with a commercial litigation firm and in Boston with the litigation bureau of the Massachusetts Department of Revenue.
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