Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Decline of Manufacturing


From the New York Times' Economix Blog, this nice picture which shows that the US is not exceptional in the relative decline of manufacturing in employment. Why? A big part of it is that more and more often, manufacturing is happening in developing countries instead of developed. Another reason is that manufacturing itself is becoming relatively less important as a part of GDP as technology has made services more important.

This trend will continue in my opinion as what will become particularly valuable in the 21st century economy are technologies that make us more efficient.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

As mentioned in your source, productivity growth is also important in this change. It would be interesting to see wage level brought into this: are there less manufacturing jobs, but those that remain are at a higher salary (possibly a positive outcome that supports the productivity growth idea) or are the jobs the same, there are just less of them?

Unknown said...

I think thats a new phenomenon which is observed now a days .... the developing countries are more manufacturing the products as when compared to developed countries...
http://www.idrivesafely.com/texas-defensive-driving

Health and Beauty Care said...

I agree with idstexas, that developing countries are into manufacturing more then the developed countries. I think reason for this is cost effective manufacturing. It is cheap to get manufacturing products from these countries and the environmental benefits to developed countries.
Gold prices today