Roche HQ Moving from NJ to California

The Newark Star-Ledger reports that one of our largest pharmaceutical companies is leaving New Jersey:

After eight decades in New Jersey, the drugmaker Hoffmann-La Roche is changing its name and moving its headquarters to California, the latest blow to the Garden State's reputation as "the nation's medicine chest."

The moves, part of parent company Roche's proposed $44 billion takeover of the California biotechnology firm Genentech, will result in the U.S. subsidiary assuming the Genentech brand name, and will mean big changes for the company's 3,240 workers in [its Nutley-Clifton campus in] New Jersey....

...the state will lose jobs with the closing of Roche's U.S. headquarters in Nutley, the shutdown of its New Jersey manufacturing facilities by 2010 and a consolidation of finance and information-technology operations.

The story says that NJ had 20% of US pharma jobs in 1990, and now has less than 14% -- a decline that occurred because NJ only held the line on pharma jobs while pharma and medical manufacturing jobs increased nationally from 207,200 to 296,000.

To be fair, the story says that it's not totally clear whether there will be a net job loss -- there will still be some R&D taking place at the Nutley-Clifton campus, and some of Genentech's jobs will move here -- but it's never a good thing to have a headquarters leave the state. It would be a lot less troubling if it weren't consistent with a bad trend for New Jersey. If we created a more positive business climate (by which I don't mean subsidies, like Corzine wants to do for stem-cell research), then it wouldn't be hard to choose us over tax-hungry California.

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