Philadelphia is trying hard to attract a South Korean electric-car maker.

Representatives of CT&T Co. Ltd. met with Mayor Nutter last week in an effort to bring a “regional assembly and sales” operation to Philadelphia, said Curt Westlake, the company’s senior director of marketing.

In essence, it would be a final-assembly operation with a retail location where people could buy the electric car called the eZone. Founded in 2002, CT&T now makes its vehicles in South Korea. But its plan to expand in the United States calls for the company to establish RAS sites around the nation.

So far, it has set up joint ventures to do so in Greenville, S.C., and Riverside, Calif., Westlake said. The typical RAS will employ 90 to 125 people.

CT&T intends to make its U.S.-market cars entirely in this country within 18 to 24 months. To do so, it will set up a central manufacturing location to make frames and other key parts, Westlake said. States in the running for that factory are South Carolina, Georgia, California and Alabama. The decision time for that is in the next 30 days, he said.

Though we’ve heard a lot of hype about various plans for electric vehicles, CT&T fully hopes to be selling its first eZones in the United States before year’s end, Westlake said.

However, the company has a bit of a problem. Right now, it can’t import anything that can go faster than 25 m.p.h., he said. Then, there is the matter of where consumers can drive what is considered a “neighborhood electric vehicle” or “low-speed vehicle” with a range of 70 miles. Some states don’t permit them on the road. Others allow them only on streets with posted speeds as high as 35 m.p.h.

That could make some commutes tricky, but not impossible, said Westlake, who said he’s able to do about 80 percent of his errands driving a two-passenger eZone around Greenville.

The eZone looks like a cousin of Daimler’s Smart Fortwo. With a retail price projected to be under $15,000, the eZone would be comparable to the gasoline-fueled Fortwo, which has a manufacturer’s suggested retail price starting from $11,990.

Westlake said CT&T will be showing off its cars at events associated with the Group of 20 Summit in Pittsburgh later this week at the invitation of Gov. Rendell.

On one level, the University City Science Center in West Philadelphia would appear to be simply a real estate play.

Its string of office buildings stretches along Market Street between 34th and 38th Streets. But as an urban research park, owned by 32 colleges, universities, and research institutions, the science center has sought a higher calling than merely collecting rent.

Started in 1963, the science center began providing “business incubator” services before the concept was even called that. Incubators provide below-market-rate space and shared services to start-up firms that are cash-poor.

So running an incubator really won’t make an organization rich, but it can build a legacy as it has for the University City Science Center.

“It’s ironic that the business of business incubation has as many hurdles as start-up firms,” said president and chief executive officer Stephen S. Tang.

Most start-ups fail in their first two years. So how has the science center done?

Pretty well, a new survey finds. Of the 351 companies that were incubated there since 1968, 155 are still in business; 196 are gone.

That’s a 45 percent survival rate. The Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, which prepared the report, said that compares favorably with the 44 percent survival rate calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for all types of businesses between 1998 and 2002.

Ninety-three of the graduating companies are still in the region, while 37 companies are current tenants in West Philadelphia. Those high-tech firms directly employ 15,686 people. Researchers calculated the average wages paid at more than $89,000, compared with the region’s average of $54,925.

While I would’ve picked Malvern or King of Prussia as the most popular destination for post-incubator graduates, the numbers show that 42 kept their 4,980 employees in Philadelphia. Montgomery County attracted 24 firms and 6,935 workers. Chester County gained eight firms and 2,965 jobs.

We’ll always wish the impact was even greater. But when you realize that the biggest for-profit employer locally - Lockheed Martin Corp. - has 13,300 employees in the region, what the science center has been able to nurture from its four-block area of the city is impressive.

It’s human nature to want to know what the future holds.

* Will it rain on your weekend barbecue?

* Will your income-tax rate be higher next year?

* Will the economy be better six months from now?

I can’t answer the first two questions, but for the third, the Conference Board offers a glimpse through its Index of Leading Economic Indicators every month. The next release is set for Thursday at 10 a.m.

Last month, the Conference Board said the index had risen for the third straight month in June. That’s just one reason many economists view the recession as close to an end.

But as much as we’re rooting for the national economy to revive, most of us are more concerned about the region in which we live.

Select Greater Philadelphia, which markets the area in an effort to attract and retain business, wanted a way to zero in on the direction of economic conditions of the 11-county region it covers.

So the group retained the economics firm IHS Global Insight to construct a regional index from indicators that change six months ahead of adjustments in the overall business cycle.

They chose these four: temporary employment services, the Inquirer/Bloomberg Philadelphia Index of 195 companies’ stock prices, outbound export vessel trips, and the national LEI.

Phil Hopkins, director of research for Select Greater Philadelphia, said the regional index made its debut in the third week of September - just in time for financial markets to get clocked by the collapse of Lehman Bros. and the federal rescue of American International Group.

It was not ideal to launch such a tool at a time when economic circumstances were far from normal. The Greater Philadelphia Global Insight Leading Index sank severely during October and November and continued to slide.

Hopkins said Select Greater Philadelphia decided to keep releasing data, but didn’t trumpet its work.

On Monday, the group raised the profile on its most recent findings that project the possibility positive economic growth could return to the region by year’s end.

Still, it will take more months of increases before Hopkins is willing to call the much-awaited recovery under way.

As the site of the next Group of 20 economic summit in September, Pittsburgh is getting a lot of attention.

But is the western Pennsylvania city a national model of how to shake off the rust and embrace the “new economy,” whatever that is? Or is it still struggling with economic forces beyond its control?

The answer is both. For the last four decades, Pittsburgh has been making the painful adjustment to an economy less reliant on manufacturing.

It is home to a cluster of what we now call “green companies,” in large part thanks to the long-gone success of the steel industry that still defines the city. Pollution from steel manufacturing had grown so bad that during the ’50s political and civic leaders acted to clean up the air and water. Got lemons? Make lemonade.

On Tuesday, the liberal think tank Institute for America’s Future issued a report that attributes the economic diversification of the seven-county Pittsburgh area to “industrial planning” by government and private industry.

By industrial planning, the Washington, D.C., group means Pittsburgh’s Regional Economic Revitalization Initiative of the early ’90s, overseen by the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. Its goals read a lot like those pursued by other regions, including our own.

But the process of crafting Pittsburgh’s “critical elements for success” spawned coordination among all sorts of constituencies, coordination that eludes many regions, including our own.

“Pittsburgh has much to teach us,” the Institute for America’s Future says. But the group thinks the little-told story is the evolution of manufacturing in western Pennsylvania.

I’ll take United Steelworkers president Leo Gerard at his word when he describes Allegheny Technologies Inc.’s steel mill there as “high-tech, almost space-like.” But like Philadelphia, “eds and meds” have been the real growth engine with 230,700 jobs, not manufacturing, which employs 89,200 people.

So while the G-20 summit goes on, some attendees may tour the region’s steel mills or Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Others may wander over to the latest example of industrial planning: The $780 million Rivers Casino that opened on Saturday, creating 1,080 jobs.

People may continue to debate whether or not the Philadelphia region is a place where information technology companies want to be.

In the meantime, the Ben Franklin Technology Center of Southeastern Pennsylvania seems to keep finding small tech companies in which to invest its money.

Or rather taxpayer money, because the center is one of four in Pennsylvania that receives funding from a 26-year-old state program.

Yesterday, the Ben Franklin center announced investments in eight early-stage companies, totaling $1.59 million. Three received the $250,000 maximum:

* ClickEquations Inc., a Conshohocken software developer focused on the paid Internet search advertising market. The company was started in 2004 by Craig Danuloff, who’d founded iCat Corp., which was acquired by Intel Corp. in 1998. Its CEO is Lucinda Holt, who started TurnTide and Destiny WebSolutions, both of which received Ben Franklin funding.

* ColdLight Solutions L.L.C., a Wayne developer of software-as-a-service applications to help businesses evaluate strategies. It previously received $250,000 from Ben Franklin.

* TicketLeap Inc., a Philadelphia provider of an online ticketing and event management service used by more than 8,000 venues and event organizers. TicketLeap also had gotten another $250,000 from Ben Franklin.

Technology is often about building bridges, and one Bucks County company is trying to make sure the bridges and highways that we build stay built. Smart Structures Inc., which got $230,000, makes a wireless sensor that is designed to be put into wet concrete during construction and monitor any changes.

Ben Franklin also invested $87,500 into a company that has been trying to take the paper out of what was supposed to be the paperless society. Based in West Philadelphia, the Neat Co. has several products that enable people to scan their receipts, bills and business cards and organize them. The Ben Franklin center had previously put $600,000 into it.

Other companies to obtain funding were: CoreDial L.L.C., of Plymouth Meeting, $100,000; Sage Technologies Ltd., of Warminster, $200,000; and Hybrid Integration L.L.C., of Yardley, $225,000.

How do you market a region like Philadelphia that probably has lost more types of industry than most American cities can cultivate?

Sure, we lean a little heavy on the health-care and education sectors. But many regions count those institutions among their biggest employers. Slogans like “Phila-health-ia” or “City of Brainiacs” won’t cut it.

But the pharmaceutical industry has persisted and grown locally, and it’s a big reason why the region is identified with medical innovation.

A study released yesterday will give the economic development spin-sters new reasons to tout Philadelphia’s status in the life sciences. Researchers with the Milken Institute determined that the nation’s leading area for life sciences was, well, Boston. But Philadelphia was No. 2, ahead of San Francisco. (Here's a link to my story on Philly.com.)

Between 2003 and 2007, the number of people working in a 12-county Philadelphia cluster of pharmaceutical, biotech, medical-device and R&D institutions rose from 53,500 to 56,300. Only New York, with 68,062 jobs, had a bigger labor base among the 11 areas studied.

Many of those local employees work for “mature” drug companies, such as Merck, GlaxoSmithKline and Wyeth. They’re a source of strength because drug companies have big supply chains and engage in a wide range of activities, said Ross C. DeVol, Milken’s director of regional economics.

Those medicine mills also face challenges as Big Pharma consolidates, tiptoes along the “patent cliff,” and braces for changes to a health-care system we all know and dislike.

The study also points out a vulnerability: Philadelphia ranked ninth out of 11 metro areas in terms of the number and growth of life-sciences businesses under 20 workers.

Philip Hopkins, vice president of research for Select Greater Philadelphia, said his group and the seven other sponsors of the study wanted to know how the region had held up over the last four years. To him, the results validate their emphasis on marketing the region to attract new life-sciences employers.

I’m sure they’ll try to dazzle with the 114 pages of data, but wouldn’t it be great to have a catch-phrase?

The City of Brotherly Life Sciences? The Cradle of Medicine? Cure-adelphia?

It doesn’t take a college degree to understand that the high dropout rate in Philadelphia’s schools is bad for the city’s economic competitiveness.

Employers constantly complain that job applicants they see don’t have the skills they need. That includes high school and college graduates. Dropouts? Forget it.

As well-intentioned as it sounds, simply telling students “stay in school” isn’t cutting it.

Thanks to a new study by Northeastern University, I suggest we appeal to their greed: “Stay in school, make more money.”

The study, released by the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board, determined a high school graduate in Philadelphia earns almost twice the lifetime earnings of a high school dropout. That’s $870,600 vs. $457,100.

The mean annual earnings of a dropout in the city were only $9,663. Compare that with the $19,437 for someone with a high-school diploma or $47,613 to someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

The 77-page study outlines all the costs to society in great detail. But to me, the mercenary message that 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th graders need to hear over and over is: “You’ll make more money if you graduate.”

Dropouts who think they’ll just get a job often don’t. The study says only 39 percent of dropouts were employed in the city in 2006. That was when the economy was ascendant. Millions of jobs have been wiped out since then.

Another study released yesterday noted Philadelphia boosted its graduation rate by 23.2 percentage points between 1995 and 2005. Impressive progress, but still only 62.1 percent of Philadelphia School District students graduate, according to the report prepared for America’s Promise Alliance.

A lot of things are out of our personal control. Graduating from high school in the richest country on earth should not be one of them.

Quotable

“We’re watching things very closely but will pounce only when the sun, moon and stars align.”

- Peter Carlino, CEO of Penn National Gaming Inc. , the Wyomissing-based operator of racetracks and casinos, told Bloomberg News referring to possible acquisitions of properties on the Las Vegas Strip.

More and more, you can feel the change in the tone of the guessing game over whether the economy is still weakening or beginning to strengthen.

Much of the economic data continues to be bad, but what encourages some experts is that rate of deterioration has slowed. The U.S. economy is still wounded, but perhaps some healing has started.

Locally, that means it’s time to ponder if the Philadelphia region will follow its typical pattern of sliding slowly into recession and climbing out slowly while other areas charge ahead into recovery.

The Economy League of Greater Philadelphia asked 32 regional business and nonprofit leaders for their thoughts on Philadelphia’s response this time. Over three days in February, the league held roundtables to discuss the health of and prospects for the region’s economy.

The group was united in its belief that the concentration of health-care and educational institutions had softened the blow once again. But even those two sectors have begun to freeze hiring and cut employees.

The job market is a lagging economic indicator. So employment continues to shrink even as economic recoveries take hold. Gerald L. Perrins Jr., regional economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said the unemployment rate in the city during recessions historically lags behind any recovery by two years. So Philadelphia undoubtedly will be playing catch-up again.

Architects, engineers and commercial developers see little to cheer them. Attendance at conventions is down. Small businesses are feeling the credit squeeze.

Several of the participants did see optimistic signs. Paul Levy, CEO of the Center City District, said that office occupancy rates in Center City were the highest ever in 2008. Tom Morr, CEO of Select Greater Philadelphia, a group that seeks to attract and retain companies, said inquiries from firms seeking information about relocating here have not fallen off.

And, the seeds of the recession were sown in an overheated housing market and financial services’ boom. Neither really were factors in regionally. In this case, missing out meant we haven’t seen “contraction as severe,” the report says.

But there remains a feeling of uncertainty, that this recession is very different from the last two.

The group considered the chance that the arrival of the worst in our region simply has been delayed. “We might experience the downturn most acutely later than others, and as a result we might also emerge from it later,” says the league’s report.

Allison Kelsey, director of communications for the Economy League, says they hope to get the group together again in six months to revisit these issues.

But why wait for the experts? You can weigh in on regional economic outlook by filling out a survey about the biggest issues facing the U.S. and the Philadelphia region.

For the defense

One company that’s not based in the region, but employs more than 11,000 people here, will bring its annual meeting to Philadelphia this week.

Lockheed Martin Corp. will hold its meeting at the Doubletree Hotel Philadelphia, 237 S. Broad St., on Thursday at 10:30 a.m. (If you can’t attend in person, you can listen to a live webcast here.)

Besides the usual votes on directors and independent auditor, there are three shareholder-sponsored proposals.

One asks the board of directors to provide a full report on Lockheed Martin’s involvement in space-based weapons. The resolution is sponsored by a group of religious organizations, including Philadelphia’s Saint Joseph Convent, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, and Catholic Health East, the Newtown Square-based hospital system.

Another proposal, sponsored by the City of Philadelphia Public Employees Retirement System, requiring shareholder approval of “golden coffin” compensation agreements. Just like it sounds, such policies obligate a company to make payments of salary, bonuses and other benefits following the death of a senior executive.

The third effort, put forward by a Redondo, Calif. man, seeks to give shareholders the right to vote on executive pay. It’s one of many “say on pay” measures being considered at annual meetings this spring.

Need I mention that the Lockheed Martin board opposes all three resolutions?

Trading Places

The World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia has hired Linda M. Conlin as its president.

She’ll join the nonprofit economic development group June 1. Conlin is currently vice chair and first vice president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States in Washington.

Before that, she’d been executive director of New Jersey’s Commerce and Economic Growth Commission during the Whitman administration.

Conlin succeeds Joanna Savvides, who founded the local World Trade Center group in 2002. Savvides announced her retirement in November.

Earnings

Tuesday: Ametek, DuPont, Harleysville Group, Fulton Financial, Lockheed Martin, Merck & Co.;

Wednesday: Air Products, Boeing, Destination Maternity, GlaxoSmithKline, Kensey Nash, Vist Financial;

Thursday: AmerisourceBergen, Delphi Financial, Encorium Group, Exelon, FMC, Hershey, J&J Snack Foods, NutriSystem, Omega Flex, Penn National Gaming, PNC Financial Services, SEI Investments, SuperValu, US Airways, Univest;

Friday: Quigley, Republic First Bancorp, Wilmington Trust, WSFS Financial.

The future of Drexel University without Constantine Papadakis will be the subject of serious reflection in the coming months.

But the sudden death of the man who transformed Drexel over more than 13 years resonated immediately in many boardrooms.

Papadakis was serving as a director on a number of boards, including five publicly held companies:

* Amkor Technology Inc., the Chandler, Ariz., semiconductor packaging and test services company. (It was once based in West Chester.)

* Aqua America Inc., the Bryn Mawr water utility.

* CDI Corp., the Philadelphia provider of professional staffing and outsourcing services.

* Mace Security International Inc., the Horsham maker of personal defense and surveillance equipment.

* Met-Pro Corp., the Harleysville maker of pollution-control equipment.

He also served on the boards of other groups, including the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce executive committee and the Opera Company of Philadelphia.

Papadakis joined the board of Mace in 1999, Met-Pro in 2004 and the rest in 2005. That’s a diverse group ranging in revenue size from Mace’s $50.9 million to Amkor’s $2.7 billion.

Because they’re publicly held, most issued statements to inform shareholders about the loss of a director. Some went beyond boilerplate to express sadness over his death Sunday night.

Met-Pro CEO Raymond J. De Hont said: “His contribution to the Company’s growth and success was significant.”

“We are profoundly stunned at the early passing of a good man,” said Mace CEO Dennis Raefield.

Got a good idea?

One reason good ideas at colleges rarely stray off-campus around here is the lack of “proof-of-concept funding.”

Researchers may need only a small amount of money to prove their ideas could be viable in the commercial world, but such funding is scarce locally.

Now the University City Science Center says it is launching a program to provide up to $200,000 for “life-science technologies with high commercial potential.”

The Science Center will pick three technologies to fund from 10 area institutions later this summer.