On Jan 12, 2008, at 2:08 AM, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> Yeah, but as societies get richer, you'd expect more employment to
> go to
> services at the expense of factories, since productivity rises
> faster in
> mfg. The best metric to judge the accuracy of the notion that the US
> doesn't do mfg anymore is the US share of world mfg output or value
> added. According to the World Bank, it only fell from 24.6% in 1982 to
> 23.8% in 2004. The EU has experienced a bigger decline. (Sorry,
> Dennis.)
> And the US is still #1.
I can't find anything like that in the WB's World Development Indicators database. Their data for value-added in mfg only begins in 1987 for the U.S., and later for other countries. I've seen similar claims that are based on real output rather than nominal, which is a dodgy proposition, given different national treatment of price indexes and changing industry mixes. Here are some WB stats on mfg share of GDP. The U.S. has fallen harder, starting from a lower level, than the other countries.
1993 1996 2003 1993-2003 1996-2003 Germany 23.6 22.2 22.3 -1.3 +0.1 Japan 23.3 21.0 -2.4 Sweden 18.8 21.5 19.7 +0.9 -1.8 United States 18.4 18.2 14.6 -3.8 -3.6