A brief snippet – the following graph from a ZeroHedge article showing the share of global exports in 1980 and 2011 grabbed my attention with the declines in every category for things made in the UK :
Interestingly, South Korea’s gains in each category over the last 30 years almost match the UK’s declines. Not as notable though as China’s rise to a powerful exporter in such a short time.
Jorb – I thought about that while I was writing the post but Germany seems to have managed to keep a larger share of it’s 1980 share of production and they surely have all the impediments you mention?
You, and zerohedge, are missing an important point. Manufacturing in Britain is larger than it was 30 years ago. We have a smaller piece of the overall pie, than we used to. i.e. the world market in this area is growing faster than we are, but we are still growing.
The reason for this is simple, Britain is no longer a good place to manufacture – labour costs, employment law, EU bullshit etc make the UK an expensive place to manufacture large scale, well, anything. Countries without these impediments – e.g. S Korea, China etc are getting more of it.
Unfortunately the worm is turning for those places that rely on cheap labour because mechanization and automation is going to do to them what the automation of agriculture did to the western world in the 1930s. Lets just hope we dont have to have another depression to get past it.
J.