I'll just quote a few relevant passages---there are supposed to be charts and graphs and stuff, but I can't seem to find this article on the Financial Times where the story originates from....
Article Title: World manufacturing employment: The continuing paradox
URL: http://makeashorterlink.com/?V3C536AC
"Thus, as is clear from a comparison of Charts 2a and 2b, the share of Germany in world manufacturing exports fell quite sharply from 16 per cent to 10 per cent over the decade, and most other major developed country exporters experienced declines in their shares of at least one percentage point or more. Only the US increased its share, from 12 to 14 per cent, contrary to the widely held perception that it dominated world manufactured goods trade only by virtue of its huge capacity for manufactured imports. In contrast to this, countries such as the People's Republic of China and Mexico managed to nearly triple their shares (albeit from relatively low bases) over this period.
These trends are confirmed by the rates of growth of manufacturing exports of the major exporters, as shown in Chart 3. Among the major developed industrial countries, the US experienced by far the fastest rate of manufactured export expansion. However, a number of developing countries showed dramatically high rates of export growth of nearly 20 per cent annual average over the decade. It should be noted that this cover the period from 1990 to 2000, and so includes periods such as the East Asian crisis and the subsequent world economic recession, during which such export growth could be expected to have slowed down somewhat.
With such rapid rates of manufacturing export growth, fears of de-industrialisation would appear to be misplaced. In any case, such high rates would suggest that employment in manufacturing would also have grown at reasonably high, or at least positive, rates, over this period. However, the UNIDO data on aggregate employment in manufacturing over the period 1985-99, as described for some countries in Chart 4, suggest a very different tendency. In fact, it turns out that in most of the countries, aggregate manufacturing employment has actually fallen, in some cases quite substantially.
Among major developed countries, only the US shows a positive rate of employment growth for aggregate manufacturing, and that too only the very low rate of 0.1 per cent per annum, which is akin to stagnation. Other developed countries show declines in manufacturing employment."
"In sum, the evidence on developing country manufacturing employment, even in the sectors supposedly associated with the highest rates of export expansion and industrial relocation, suggests that net increases in employment generation have been concentrated in very few countries. Most developing countries have actually experienced stagnation or even declines in aggregate manufacturing employment."
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 AIM: KDean75206 Buffalo Activist Network http://www.buffaloactivist.net http://www.yaysoft.com
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