Opportunities in an urbanizing world

A great report from Credit Suisse Research - - Opportunities in an urbanizing world.  We are in the middle of one of the largest migrations in human history - - in 1950, 70% of the planet lived in a rural setting.  By 2050, 70% of the planet will be in an urban environment.

The opportunities are especially true for engineers.  Catherine Rampell pointed this out in a April 11, 2012 New York Times article - - Never Mind Factories.  Think Services.  The article rightly points out our advantage in high-skilled engineering that we can sell to the rest of the urbanizing world.  Rampell writes the following:

"There is this huge infrastructure boom where these big, fast-growing economies are going to need to build out their roads, sewers, telecommunications networks, factories, airports, harbors, you name it," said J. Bradford Jensen, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and author of a recent book {Global Trade in Services: Fear, Facts, and Offshoring} on global services trade.  "All those projects require armies of architects, engineers, project managers, financial insurers.  These are all the finds of tradable services that we have an advantage in providing."

Given these opportunities, Mr. Jensen estimated that the United States has the potential to more than double its annual exports of services annually, creating an additional $800 billion in tradable business services like engineering and law alone.  ("Tradable" refers to services that can easily be done across borders, as opposed to work like cutting hair or drawing blood.)