Where U.S. Companies Are Reshoring Jobs From

Rising tensions between Beijing and Washington over the Taiwan situation have reignited chatter about a potential decoupling of the two countries that are closely entangled economically. And while experts consider this an unlikely scenario, many U.S. companies are still looking to reduce their dependency on the Asian superpower. As the Covid pandemic made painfully clear, global supply chains expose companies to risks far away from home, risks that are often harder to anticipate or mitigate than the ones faced at home.

Many companies are currently reevaluating their supply chains, and government incentives do their part in promoting reshoring, or the return of some overseas production to the United States. According to estimates from the Reshoring Initiative, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs have returned to the United States over the past decade, with China topping the list of origin countries. As the following chart shows, China, Mexico and Canada accounted for three quarters of reshored jobs between 2010 and 2021 and that might be a conservative estimate.

As the Reshoring Initiative notes, about 75 percent of reshoring cases do not report the source country, but they are expecting the true share of jobs returning from China to be even higher, as many companies avoid publicizing moves away from China for fear of retaliation.