Maryland is a U.S. state situated within the Mid Atlantic area of the country, nearby Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia to its south and west; Pennsylvania towards its north; and the state of Delaware to its east. The state of Maryland was the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution, and three nicknames for it: the Free State, the Chesapeake Bay State and the Old Line State are occasionally utilized. Baltimore is the most inhabited city in the state of Maryland. Annapolis is its capital.
Maryland's economic activity is mostly focused on the tertiary service sector, and this particular sector, in turn, is mostly influenced by location. One major service activity is transportation, centered on the Port of Baltimore and its related rail and trucking access. The port ranked 17th in the nation by tonnage in 2008. Even though the port deals with a wide array of products, the most typical imports are bulk commodities and raw materials, like for example iron ore, petroleum, sugar, and fertilizers, often distributed to the rather close manufacturing centers of the inland Midwest via good overland transportation. The port also receives several various brands of imported motor vehicles and is the number two auto port within the nation
A second service activity takes advantage of the close location of the center of government within Washington, D.C. and emphasizes administrative and technical tasks for the defense/aerospace industry and bio-research laboratories, in addition to staffing of satellite government head office in the exurban or suburban Baltimore/Washington area. Also, numerous medical and educational research institutions are located in Maryland. In reality, the various components of The Johns Hopkins University together with its medical research facilities are now the largest single employer in the Baltimore area. Altogether, white collar technical and administrative staff consist of 25% of Maryland's labor force, attributable partly to neighboring state of Maryland being a part of the Washington Metro Area where there is relatively high federal government office employment.
The state of Maryland has a large food-production sector. A huge part of this is commercial fishing, centered in Chesapeake Bay, but likewise including activity off the short Atlantic seacoast. The biggest catches by species are the blue crab, oysters, striped bass, and menhaden. The Bay likewise has uncounted millions of overwintering waterfowl in its many wildlife refuges. Though not, strictly speaking, a commercial food resource, the waterfowl support a tourism sector of sportsmen.
The state of Maryland is a key center for research in life sciences and development. There are about 400 biotechnology companies within the state of Maryland, making the state of Maryland the fourth-largest biotech economy within the nation.
Within the state of Maryland, there are many Institutions and government agencies with an interest in research and development, like: the John Hopkins Applied Physics laboratory, the John Hopkins University, more than one campus of the University System of Maryland, the United States Census Bureau, Goodard Space Flight Center, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Celera Genomics company, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), the Human Genome Sciences (HGS), and MedImmune, which just acquired by AstraZeneca.