But it also has stoked hopes for U.S. factories, including some in the Philadelphia area's shrunken manufacturing sector, whose products are now bargains for buyers paying with euros.

"The dollar decline is certainly helping the environment at our facility in Conshohocken," said Ferdinand Bartels, head of W.C. Heraeus GmbH & Co.'s circuit materials division.

Bartels visited from the company's German headquarters last week to open a new $1 million clean room at the plant, which employs 92 professionals and operatives manufacturing parts for auto and computer makers.

"We planned our current budget under the expectation the dollar will remain weak," Bartels said. The economic slowdown has hurt the company's U.S. customers, but the weak dollar has made Conshohocken more attractive as a place to make pieces for export to Europe, Asia and Latin America, he said.

In Northeast Philadelphia, Bill Strecker, chief executive officer at the turbine-bearing maker Kingsbury Inc., said the strong euro had brought his company naval orders for Europe for the first time.

"Usually in a military setting, they go with a homegrown product," Strecker said. "But now these guys from Europe are putting our products in their ships. It's really connected to the euro. The exchange is huge right now, in our favor."

Combined with Chinese industrial orders, the new European business has helped raise exports to a majority of Kingsbury's orders, up from 30 percent earlier this decade, Strecker said.

Sunoco Inc. and FMC Corp. are among the Philadelphia companies that have reported a rise in export demand for key products in recent weeks.

Those hopeful signs haven't ended the long decay of Philadelphia as an industrial-employment center. The city and its Pennsylvania suburbs were home to 152,000 factory jobs at the end of 2007, down 16 percent since 2002, accelerating a 14 percent drop from 1997 to 2002.

Nationally, factory jobs decreased just 7 percent in the last five years, an improvement over a 15 percent decline from 1997 to 2002. Much of that decline has been concentrated in regions such as Philadelphia, as aging plants and higher expenses, including health-care costs, made the region less competitive.

The weak dollar doesn't cure all those problems. Factories in Montgomery, Berks, Philadelphia and other Pennsylvania counties "are getting squeezed on increases in raw-material costs, delivery charges and fuel costs," said Richard Sarfert, head of the manufacturing loans group at Boyertown-based National Penn Bank.

"But at the same time, quite a few have gotten requests for price quotes from foreign entities, primarily coming out of Europe," Sarfert said. "They aren't making a lot of shipments yet. But I think the weakening of the dollar will start to help."

If jobs data don't show a recovery, broader measures do show exports are catching up with imports, said Shawkat Hammoudeh, a Drexel University professor of economics and international business.

One measure is the current-account deficit, which measures the difference between imports and exports plus other payments in and out of the United States. Higher exports can shrink the deficit.

"The decline in the dollar has lowered the current-account deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product," Hammoudeh said. "In the fourth quarter of 2005, the deficit was 6.8 percent of GDP. By the third quarter of 2007, it was 5.1 percent. That shows the depreciating dollar is really helping exports."

The gap hasn't closed further because U.S. oil imports are still going up and the dollar value of all imports is rising with higher prices, Hammoudeh said.

Outside Europe, other major currencies don't show as much gain against the dollar. However, the dollar's weakness against the euro is having an impact in other countries, with state agencies and investors in Russia and China holding more euros as protection against the dollar's drop, Hammoudeh said.