Revisiting Deindustrialization: Understanding Differential Performance of Manufacturing in Industrial Countries

There has been a relative decline in the manufacturing sectors of industrial countries called “deindustrialization” which consists of the decline in manufacturing employment and share of labor, factory closings, trade deficits, decline in the share of manufacturing in GDP, and the decline in the share of industrial countries in global manufacturing exports. This study documents and analyzes the changes in income distribution, relative growth, employment, and trade in the manufacturing sector in selected industrial countries – the USA, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and the Republic of Korea – that occurred between 1970 and 2015. The book shows that the performance is highly variable even in this small sample of industrial countries and serious decline in manufacturing sector apply to only a few of these countries. For this, the book presents detailed individual country analyses in the second part of this study, and summarizes the main findings in the first section of the study.