Governor Tom Corbett will lead a trade delegation to Europe in the spring of 2012, the governor's office announced this month. A group of business and government leaders will travel to Germany and France in March in an effort to boost Pennsylvania's export markets and lure European investors to the state.
The trip is being organized by Team Pennsylvania, a business advocacy group with close ties to the Corbett administration. President and CEO Matt Zieger said that the trade mission will focus on shoring up French and German markets that already import more than $2.2 billion from Pennsylvania-based companies. "If you take them together, it's the state's fourth largest export market," Zieger said.
In addition to buying up goods and services from the Keystone State, Zieger said that many European firms are keen to invest in Pennsylvania. The delegation will try to entice more of them to hire Pennsylvanians.
"There are actually more than a thousand French- and German-based companies here in Pennsylvania," Zieger said. "So there's almost twelve hundred of them in total that employ something close to 35,000 Pennsylvanians."
The trip will be privately funded by through the Team Pennsylvania Foundation.
