Resources and Purchasing Power of the New York Region

New York - Hub of the American Economy. All the Regions of the United States Are lnterdependent.

The extraordinary growth in the wealth of the United States in the past 150 years, which has been equaled by no other people in the world’s history, has been due in no small degree to the fact that this Nation is virtually a self-sufficient continent, containing in abundance the earth’s basic minerals, producing the principal crops of both the tropical and temperate zones, and possessing great ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The interchange of goods, services and ideas between different regions of the United States, each producing the commodities for which it is best adapted by nature, has created the wealthiest free trade market that has ever existed.

The prosperity of any single region is benefited by the development of every other section of these forty-eight united states, because the growth of pur­chasing power anywhere in this country broadens the market for manufactured goods, for banking, for life insurance, for farm products, for transportation and other services. There is healthy competition between regions, but this merely serves to allocate the production of commodities to those areas where they can be produced at the lowest cost and consequently sold at the cheapest price to the consumer. The manner in which the national population and wealth have been distributed between regions as a result of the operation of these economic forces has produced the greatest per capita income any nation has ever enjoyed.

In this report, which seeks to explain the fundamental causes for the concentration of wealth and population around the New York Region, it is also made apparent that New York will only prosper as the Nation’s market hub if the other regions expand their purchasing power.