The survey was done by Manufacturers’ News Incorporated, an Illinois-based publishing company that studied Arizona’s manufacturing sector between April 2013 and April 2014.  The firm’s president, Tom Dubin, said Arizona suffered significant job losses in solar equipment manufacturing.

"There’s higher production costs, there were some import tariffs put on solar cells and aluminum frames and there’s kind of a global oversupply of solar modules so that’s an industry that’s been affected,” Dubin said.

But an official with the State Department of Administration said their survey shows Arizona lost only 200 manufacturing jobs during the same period. She said the two surveys might have slight differences in how the job losses were counted.