The modern ledger: what the federal count says

2005 — 2024

The count kept now, in dollars: Since 2005 the International Trade Administration's Metropolitan Export Series has counted goods exports for every American metropolitan area by the Census Bureau's origin-of-movement method — goods credited to the metro from which their export journey begins. The metro so measured is South Bend–Mishawaka: the series counts the two-city manufacturing metro whole, Mishawaka's plants inside the number, and no city-only series exists; the figure below is the metro's, printed as the metro's. Its published waypoints give the modern outward trade its scale. The U.S. Conference of Mayors' metropolitan export report of February 2012 (IHS Global Insight data) counted the South Bend–Mishawaka metro — then a two-state metro reaching into Michigan — at $877 million of merchandise exports in 2005, $1,027 million in 2006, $1,057 million in 2007, $1,077 million in 2008, $785 million in the recession year 2009 and $894 million in 2010. The International Trade Administration's state report of February 2018 counted the metro's 2016 goods exports at $1.5 billion. And the U.S. Trade Representative's Indiana page, in the latest data available to it, records South Bend–Mishawaka goods exports of $989.6 million in 2024 — behind Indianapolis, Evansville, Lafayette, Elkhart-Goshen, Bloomington, Columbus, Fort Wayne and Kokomo among Indiana's own metros. The waypoints are not a straight line and are not printed as one: the series' geography and methods have been revised across two decades, the metro's own boundaries have been redrawn in the interval, and the honest reading is the level, not the slope — a metro of some 320,000 people ships on the order of a billion dollars of goods a year into the world's markets, two centuries after its first product, a wagon, was rolled out of a blacksmith shop to be sold to strangers.

Sources:

1. U.S. Conference of Mayors / IHS Global Insight, U.S. Metro Economies: Exports in the Next Decade (February 2012) — South Bend–Mishawaka merchandise exports of $877 million (2005), $1,027 million (2006), $1,057 million (2007), $1,077 million (2008), $785 million (2009) and $894 million (2010), and exports as 7.5–8.9 percent of gross metropolitan product across those years.
2. International Trade Administration, "Michigan Exports, Jobs, & Foreign Investment" (updated February 2018) — South Bend–Mishawaka 2016 goods exports of $1.5 billion, the cross-state metro counted on Michigan's page.
3. Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Indiana state page — South Bend–Mishawaka goods exports of $989.6 million in 2024, "latest data available."
4. International Trade Administration, Metropolitan Export Series — the origin-of-movement (OM-ZIP) methodology by which metro exports are estimated.