If John Kerry is elected president, Democrats foresee a new partnership between the federal government and states. The U.S. senator from Massachusetts accepted his party's presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention Thursday night, and he and his supporters said a Kerry White House would pursue new strategies to create jobs, lessen health care costs and boost state economies. more

The growing zeal to keep U.S. jobs from going overseas including state jobs has the high-tech industry scrambling to defuse the anti-outsourcing sentiment surfacing in more than half the countrys statehouses. A new report says global outsourcing of computer-services jobs will create more than 317,000 other new U.S. jobs in 2008, including 34,000 jobs in California and 24,000 in Texas. more

States are wrestling over whether they should contract out or "outsource" their information technology projects to private companies, including those located overseas. While farming out state high-tech work may be cheaper and more efficient, state politicians are leery of the possible voter backlash about losing state jobs to foreign companies, industry and government officials said. more

Mississippi led the way in increasing jobs and revenue in the service sector between 1992 and 1997, a new Census Bureau report shows. Service industry jobs, in hotels, restaurants, computer rental firms, technical training schools, temp agencies and other similar enterprises, accounted for more than half of all new jobs created nationwide in the non-farm private economy during the most recent five-year period for which complete information is available. more

In the South and West, state and local government filled 270,000 new positions last year, eighty percent of the total non-federal public service hiring and a number that shows how these regions are growing. Overall 1998 state and local hiring also continued to expand, according to a new study by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. more