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:
“Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequently, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we “really” experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical terms.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)