“The growth in imports from China had a role in that decline–contributing, perhaps, to as much as one-quarter of the employment drop-off from 1991 to 2007, according to an analysis by David Autor and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But the U.S. jobs slide began well before China’s rise as a manufacturing power.” (Charles Kenny, Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere, Bloomberg, April 28, 2014)

The U.S. share of global manufacturing value added has been declining for some time. In fact, employment in manufacturing has declined in most major manufacturing countries over the past quarter-century. The American decline since 1990 has been similar to declines in Western Europe and Japan. Indeed, manufacturing employment is falling almost everywhere, including in China.Moreover, the U.S. manufacturing jobs slide began well before China’s rise as a manufacturing power.

For example, Japan’s share of global manufacturing production has contracted from a peak of 21.3% in 1993 to around 7% now, and Germany’s has fallen from 10.4% in 1992 to about 6.5%. The declining shares of global manufacturing by the advanced economies are a consequence of the very rapid increase in manufacturing activity in emerging economies, particularly China. The shift in production to China and other emerging market countries obviously also had a negative effect on employment in the advanced countries.

Aside from the aggressive push by China to dominate the world trade in manufacturing, another major development that has preceded the China factor are new technologies and productivity gains that have been job displacing but have also allowed production to continue to increase.

The following charts illustrate this very clearly for the U.S., which has experienced both declining employment and increased manufacturing production since 1980.

Finally, at this time with the strong U.S. dollar, U.S. manufacturing costs per unit (expressed in U.S. dollars) are not very competitive with other jurisdictions such as China, Mexico and Canada.