G-20 Manufacturing: A Look At The Numbers

It's fairly common to refer to the world's wealthier nations as industrialized nations, though with the advent of outsourcing and widespread export-oriented development strategies, that term isn't as precise as it used to be. Then even if it were precise, discussions of global economic issues often involve numbers that we're ill-prepared to digest and have little to compare to; all the numbers just sound ridiculously large. This is an attempt to quantify industrialization and break it down for comparison among the 20 largest national economies.

So below are the manufacturing output and gross domestic product data for 19 members of the G20, excluding the European Union (which isn't a country,) and including Iran (which would be in the G20 if they were on better terms with the U.S.) broken down per capita and relative to each other.

The countries are ranked in order of their manufacturing:population ratio, or the per capita manufacturing share of GDP. The population figures can be compared to further add some perspective on how relatively industrial different nations are, and how productive (or industrialized) their economies are.

Relative productivity is also important to an understanding of manufacturing as a global industry because manufacturing job pools haven't only been shrinking within countries as investors and managers pit countries against each other on cost. In fact, the global pool of manufacturing jobs has been shrinking [1], at least in part because of increases in productivity.

A policy solution focused on boosting wages for the general world population might create enough demand to reverse that trend in declining manufacturing employment. Though in the current recession that seems unlikely. A U.S. Census Bureau report indicates that median U.S. income dropped 3.6 percent from 2007-2008 [2], suggesting that a decline in consumer spending power was in full swing before the financial meltdown and subsequent tightening of the credit markets.

The next post in this series will look at the balance of trade as compared to national manufacturing and productive output for seven countries, including the U.S., China, and a selection of five countries with living standards comparable to the U.S.

Resources

*  - 2008 population data (pdf) [3]; World Bank figures
** - 2008 GDP and Manufacturing output in current US dollars [4]; United Nations figures
~  - UN manufacturing data for China isn't separated out from mining and utilities, used a 78% multiplier [5] on the UN-supplied figure.