Building on an energy base, Houston has significantly diversified its economy over the past two decades. Today, the city benefits from growing contributions from the medical, aerospace, transportation, manufacturing and information technology sectors.

• Energy has dropped from 86 percent of Houston’s economic base employment to less than 50 percent.
  
  
• Diversifying sectors – those neither positively nor negatively affected by energy prices, such as computer manufacturing and medical technology – have grown from less than one-sixth to more than half of Houston’s economic base employment. These diversifying sectors account for 72 percent of net job growth in the base since 1986.
  
  
• Houston has developed a unique niche as a center for applied technology – the engineering and technical management skills needed to translate advances in basic science and mathematics into practical applications not only in energy, but also in aerospace, medicine, computer hardware and software, and many other areas.
  
  
• Upstream energy – oil and gas exploration and production, the manufacture and wholesaling of oilfield equipment, and pipeline transportation – declined from more than two-thirds of Houston’s economic base employment in 1981 to less than one-third today.
  
  
• Downstream energy – refining and chemicals manufacturing – has remained fairly stable at about 15.5 percent of the base.
  
  
• The diversification of Houston’s economic base over the past two decades makes energy prices less important as determinants of Houston’s growth.  It also reduces Houston's vulnerability to downturns in upstream energy, which nonetheless continues to influence Houston far more than it does the nation as a whole.

Sources: Greater Houston Partnership, Texas Education Agency, The Perryman Group, ACCRA, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Dun & Bradstreet