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In the race to succeed retiring Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, you hear a lot of China bashing and the ills of globalization in this prototypical Midwestern state. What you don’t hear in this persistently xenophobic yet critical race for a spot in the US Senate is just how much Ohio has benefitted from globalization.
The seventh-largest state’s $736 billion gross domestic product owes more of its prosperity to the growing interdependence of the world’s economies than any other after California, Texas and Florida. That’s based on the 771 active foreign factories located in Ohio, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Among the 10 biggest US states, Ohio has the most foreign-owned factories per thousand square miles.
None of these inconvenient truths are uttered by the two men competing to succeed Portman, who as President George W. Bush’s US Trade Representative negotiated and signed …
