The pessimist’s view: with globalization and companies buying up western brands, Made in USA will cease to mean anything.
   While there are Chinese firms like NAC buying up MG or Acer eyeing Gateway, manufacturing can still survive if the higher-cost nation innovates and finds ever-higher-tech things to make, before the technology is transferred to the lower-cost one(s). The problem with the capitalist system is that the money is not so much going back to innovate and develop, but being returned to stake-holders as short-term profit. Oftentimes, companies hide behind brands rather than truly innovate.
   This is happening in New Zealand, where manufacturing, especially in textiles, is departing these shores. Meanwhile, Japan and other nations have held on to some of their textile manufacture through innovation (e.g. seamless garments), creating things that many cheaper nations cannot—yet.
   In Information Week, Rob Preston notes that the US remains the leader in high-tech production—so much for everything being outsourced. While Red China has increased from 1 per cent in 1980 to 9·3 per cent in 2003 (the latest year for which figures from the Global Insight World Industry Service database are available), the US has stayed reasonably stable at 42·5 per cent, marginally down from 43·1 per cent in 2002.
   Mr Preston adds:

In comparison, the European Union’s share of global high-tech manufacturing peaked around 1980, at about 34%, falling to 28% in 1990, 20% in 2000, and an estimated 18.4% in 2003. Japan’s share of global high-tech production peaked in the early 1990s, at around 25%, trending downward each year until 2003, to about 12%.

And if you examine who the biggest R&D spenders are for 2005, there are plenty of American firms, according to Booz, Allen & Hamilton: ‘Ford, Pfizer, Toyota, Daimler Chrysler, General Motors, Siemens, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, IBM, and GlaxoSmithKline.’
   Globalization works when the parties are ethical and long-term-focused. The trouble is that short-term greed gets the better of many corporations—which means that there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way they operate. Otherwise, western countries risk losing more jobs through “offshoring” when people are placed behind short-term stock prices and profits. Posted by Jack Yan, 04:34  permalink

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