Economy
The area's most important employment sectors are aerospace, high-tech (software, biotechnology, electronics, etc.), and tourism. Most other employment in the region is supported by these industries.
NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) is an important pillar of the area economy. As of 2010 the center itself employs 3,000 civil servants and 12,000 engineering contractors. Businesses around this core include a broad range of high-tech development enterprises. JSC manages more than $4 billion annually in aerospace contracts, and together with numerous private companies involved in space programs and related ventures gives the area one of the highest concentrations of aerospace businesses and expertise in the nation.
The tourism industry attracts millions of visitors each year with attractions ranging from Space Center Houston to the bay itself. Ecotourism, in particular, is a growing sector with destinations such as the Armand Bayou Nature Center, one of the largest urban wilderness preserves in the nation, and the Seabrook Trail System (part of the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail). Biotechnology, which already employs nearly 3000 workers in the area, is a smaller but growing industry in the area enabled in large part by JSC and the Texas Medical Center in Houston. Commercial fishing is one the older industries in the region and is still a significant economic sector.
Read more about this topic: Clear Lake (region)
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)