Trade Overseas Helps Create Jobs Here at Home

Our world continues to grow ever more interconnected, with greater and greater opportunity to share who we are and what we are able to create with one another.  It also creates tremendous business prospects. Ninety-five percent of the world’s customers live outside the borders of the United States.  What that means for American businesses – particularly small businesses – is opportunity. The opportunity to grow their exports, hire more American workers and expand their bottom lines.  With seventy percent of our revenue now coming from overseas, this is something that the American motion picture and television industry has had a great deal of firsthand experience with.  Our industry has been successfully exporting our creations around the world for decades, and by doing so, the economy here at home has directly benefited as a result.

In 2013 alone, the film and TV industry contributed $130 billion to the overall American economy, maintained $15.8 billion in exports worldwide and had a positive trade surplus of $13.4 billion.  But where you can see this industry’s biggest impact is in the 1.9 million American jobs and the 94,000 small businesses that we directly and indirectly support and the $47 billion in wages that we generate all across the country.  We are able to achieve that level of impact in states across our country because of the success we have had exporting our content around the globe.  If you want to see the movie and TV industry’s economic impact on a state by state level, take a look at this handy interactive map.