Posted on 04/25/2014 6:10:43 AM PDT by blam
The US Is Now A 'Rising Star' Of Global Manufacturing
James B. Kelleher, Reuters
Apr. 25, 2014, 5:05 AM
(Reuters) - Call it the comeback kid.
A new ranking of the competitiveness of the world's top 25 exporting countries says the United States is once again a "rising star" of global manufacturing thanks to falling domestic natural gas prices, rising worker productivity and a lack of upward wage pressure.
The report, released on Friday by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG,) found that while China remains the world's No. 1 country in terms of manufacturing competitiveness, its position is "under pressure" as a result of rising labor and transportation costs and lagging productivity growth.
The United States, meanwhile, which has lost nearly 7.5 million industrial jobs since employment in the sector peaked in 1979 as manufacturers shipped production to low-cost countries, is now No. 2 in terms of overall competitiveness, BCG said.
The biggest factor driving the U.S. rebound, according to BCG: cheap natural gas prices, which have tumbled 50 percent over the last decade as a result of the shale gas revolution.
Also contributing to the country's attractiveness, according to BCG, is "stable wage growth" - a euphemism for the fact that, in inflation-adjusted terms, industrial wages here are lower today than they were in the 1960s even though worker productivity has doubled over the same period of time.
"Overall costs in the U.S.," the report's authors write, "are 10 to 25 percent lower than those of the world's ten leading goods-exporting nations other than China" and on par with Eastern Europe.
Another standout in the rankings is Mexico, which BCG categorizes as a "rising star" with lower average manufacturing costs than China. But the country failed to make BCG's list of Top 10 manufacturers because of other factors
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
LULZ
Just saying:
2013 exports to China from America: 122 billion.
2013 exports to America from China: 440 billion.
There’s a new textile manufacturing plant being built here now. That’s a very startling thing to people accustomed to having given the sector up for dead twenty years ago. Nike and Walmart, among others, have been leading the way as far as “on-shoring” of formerly foreign production. Keep governmental paws off of the boon in natural gas, at least no more that currently, and it’ll continue, in right to work states at least. Start taxing the crap out of it and it will die.
zzzzzzz
If an evil Republican was in charge, the spin on the article would have been that American workers are being asked to work harder for less wages, not that we are a "rising star" of manufacturing. It would have been "American Workers are in Sweatshops again."
IIRC, the approach to cheap NG from this administration is to encourage exports.
Oh, its death is 100% certain.
Taxes and regulation will come fast and hard. You kiddin’ me? We can’t have money and jobs being made without the libs/illegals/welfare fiends taking more than the majority of it!
I would take a long short on any of these new manufacturing or related businesses. You’ll make lots of money when you bet on libs being libs.
Get your kids into engineering and entrepreneurship scenarios...inventiveness and ability to run a small business is where it is at in the current and future.
Only in America would the words "wage growth" be attached to that concept.
Once were giants.
In the early 1900’s, when much of the rural south was still recovering from the Civil War and Reconstruction (what a misnomer), textile mills began to spring up to capitalize upon the low cost. They’d no doubt be regarded as sweatshops now.
One of my grandmothers went to work in one, P. H. Hanes & Co., at age ten, cleaning up around knitting machines because she was small enough to do it. Her family had lost their farm when my great grandfather passed away unexpectedly at age 48. They tried, how they tried, to keep it. My great grandmother and all the kids, ten of them, busted their backsides to try and hold it together. But, it was not to be. So, they moved to “town” and sought employment. That story was repeated all over the south in that era.
I recall as a child in the 1970’s, talking to that grandmother about this. She was old even then, in her eighties. She said it was a blessing, she didn’t mind it at all, it felt like playtime to her compared to what they’d been through on that farm.
She later married my grandfather, who had held onto his family’s land through all the turmoil and returned to the country. She ran that farm herself for twenty years after he died, so the experiences of her childhood held her in good stead.
But, she always had a soft spot for Hanes. They pulled her and her family out of a dire circumstance and she was grateful. To a sweatshop.
How about some credit to an admitted minority of US consumers? We constantly ask for made in the USA products and comment when they’re not available. It seems that some companies are responding.
Gratefulness is in short supply today.
Yes, sadly, it is. I hope it doesn’t take being blown practically back into the Stone Age again for a return to it.
There is no question that if you do not have rising wages you get a burst of productivity increase, export advantage, etc. Usually this is then followed by rising wages, which tempers that. One exception that conservatives WRONGLY point to is the 1946-63 period where we had virtually NO competition because all the other major powers had been devastated by war. US controlled 15% of world trade, nearly 40% of mfg., but the downside was . . . lack of competition, consolidation, and rising wages, which soon made US companies less efficient and US products less competitive. Other nations caught up.
Imagine having a president using his pen and telephone to reduce gubmint mandates and regulations while picking up his veto pen on new gubmint spending and taxes. Maybe it’s coming...
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