U.S. announces new measures to boost manufacturing

The Obama administration unveiled a raft of measures on Tuesday to strengthen manufacturing industry and shore up job growth.

Manufacturing entrepreneurs will be able to access more than 5 billion U.S. dollars worth of advanced equipment in federal research and development facilities that they may use to develop new technologies and launch new inventions, the White House said in a statement.

It means entrepreneurs could potentially use NASA's National Center for Advanced Manufacturing to produce the high-strength, defect-free joints required for cutting-edge aeronautics.

Five federal agencies will invest more than 150 million U.S. dollars in research to support the Materials Genome Initiative, a public-private endeavor that aims to cut in half the time it takes to develop novel material, to support the administration's investment in the manufacturing of advanced materials.

Across federal agencies, the administration has supported an increase in federal investment in manufacturing research and development by 35 percent in three years, from 1.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2011 to 1.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2014.

According to the new White House National Economic Council Report on manufacturing industry, manufacturing represents 12 percent of U.S. GDP, yet accounts for 75 percent of all U.S. private sector research and development, and the vast majority of all patents issued in the United States.

U.S. manufacturing is more competitive than it has been in decades as output has increased 30 percent since the end of the recession, growing at roughly twice the pace of the economy overall -- the longest period where manufacturing has outpaced U.S. economic output since 1965.

Since February 2010, the manufacturing sector has added 646,000 jobs, the fastest pace of job growth since the 1990s.