介绍： The US-Canadian border: The other neighbour
Meet the northern neighbours
From The Economist 20161015

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UNLIKE San Diego and Tijuana, Seattle and Vancouver are both rich and speak the same language. But connections between Washington state’s commercial capital and Canada’s biggest western c...

介绍： The US-Canadian border: The other neighbour
Meet the northern neighbours
From The Economist 20161015

Audio:

0:00




UNLIKE San Diego and Tijuana, Seattle and Vancouver are both rich and speak the same language. But connections between Washington state’s commercial capital and Canada’s biggest western city are sparse. Professionals in Seattle have more contacts in Atlanta, across the continent, than in Vancouver, just 190km (118 miles) away, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Vancouverites talk more to people in San Francisco than in Seattle.

Seeking to profit by doing more together, last month Washington state’s governor, Jay Inslee, and the premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, agreed to create the “Cascadia Innovation Corridor”, named for the Cascade mountains that range up the Pacific coast of North America.

It is not a partnership of equals. The Seattle area hosts such behemoths as Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing; Vancouver’s biggest tech company is Telus, which provides telecoms services mainly in Canada. High-tech industry accounts for 22% of Washington’s GDP; its contribution to British Columbia’s smaller economy is just 7%. Venture-capital firms invest five times more in Seattle than they do in Vancouver.


But the Canadians are ambitious upstarts. Salaries for software engineers in Vancouver are about half what they are in Seattle (although property prices are higher). Business taxes are lower, too. Canada is more open to foreign talent than the United States. Seattle’s tech giants have set up satellite offices in Vancouver. In June this year Microsoft opened its “Canada Excellence Centre”, a training and software-development office, doubling its workforce in Vancouver to 700. Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates, has praised Canada’s “enlightened” immigration policies and “good, strong universities”.

Vancouver wants to be more than just a bargain bazaar for technology talent. Ms Clark talked of creating joint degree programmes and common curriculums between the universities of British Columbia and Washington. John Wenstrup of BCG thinks venture-capital firms in Seattle should finance more start-ups in Vancouver. “Both cities could benefit from a reduction in barriers for skilled workers to work and travel on both sides of the border,” he thinks. To that end, Mr Inslee is trying to persuade the US Congress and Canada’s Parliament to end the border-control stop on the Vancouver-Seattle train.

Visionaries have whizzier ideas for speeding up the journey, which can take three or four hours by car. One $30 billion idea is for a bullet train, which could cut the journey of four hours to one. A cheaper proposal is for a special highway for driverless cars. Either would improve connections between neighbours that do not know each other as well as they should.


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