[JohnDenver]

There's a couple of world trade myths circulating on this forum which need to be cleared up.

Myth #1) China is the world's factory.

Reality: According to the latest WTO stats, China accounts for 5% of world exports. At 5.1%, France is a bigger exporter than China. The leading exporter in the world is the U.S., whose exports account for 10.7% of world exports. Number two is Germany, at 9.5%.
http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis ... ject_e.htm


Myth #2) U.S. manufacturing is in hopeless decline, and the Americans don't make anything themselves anymore.

Reality: As noted above, the U.S. is the world's #1 exporter. What are its top exports? Oddly enough, not movies, McDonald's hamburgers or Windows.

According to the Dept. of Commerce, International Trade Administration, the top 10 exports are:

1- Electrical Machry, Apparatus & Appliances
2- Motor Vehicles
3- Transport Equipment
4- Office Machines And ADP equipment
5- Power Generating Machinery
6- Miscellaneous Manufactured Articles
7- General Industrial Machry
8- Professional Scientific Instruments
9- Machinery Specialized
10- Telecommunications Equipment
http://www.ita.doc.gov/td/industry/otea ... 02T22.html

[johnmarkos]

What's sad is that we have such a huge deficit in . . . clothing? Folks, go to Goodwill!

[Sencha]

We may export the most in heavy manufacturing, but China is probably the world's greatest exporter of light manufacturing, so there's a difference that I don't think that list accounts for.

[Guest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')There's a couple of world trade myths circulating on this forum which need to be cleared up.

Myth #1) China is the world's factory.

Reality: According to the latest WTO stats, China accounts for 5% of world exports. At 5.1%, France is a bigger exporter than China. The leading exporter in the world is the U.S., whose exports account for 10.7% of world exports. Number two is Germany, at 9.5%.
http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis ... ject_e.htm

[trespam]

This myth goes both ways. I've long discarded the idea that the US no longer manufactures anything. It's just not true. The US also has very high productivity, far better than most countries.

But all these statistics must be taken with a grain of salt. For example, consider the per capita figures. How is the US doing in comparison with France and Germany, as an example, in per capita terms. Saying that the US has the largest percentage of world exports is not unexpected given that we are the largest industrial country. China looks all the worse on a per capita basis, because most of Chinas population is still agrarian.

So there are caveates to the myth busting:

1. The trends in the US are not good for the american standard of living nor for the US dollar. By trends, I mean the current account deficit and debt.

2. Per capita, I'm not sure how favorably we compare with the other industrial nations.

3. Of the manufacturing exports that are reported by the US, to what degree are we simply manufacturing the end products and outsourcing the components. How does that get reported in these statistics? Motorola, for example, manufacturers cell phones. But I'm told the've largely outsourced it. How does this show up in the statistics cited by the WTO?

4. What percentage of the above exports listed for the US are military hardware?

[duff_beer_dragon]

1. crime money - claims, proven in usual ways (stats, checks, etc), that every U$dollar bill has traces of cocaine on it ; implication being it's all been laundered or used in drugs transactions at some time or another

2. black budget money - the amounts in that are well into trillion$

Does it matter?

Has there ever really been much correlation between actual resources, and money in banks backed up by gold or silver reserves?

I read in the book Serpent in the Sky the difference between a sorceror or illusionist, and an actual magician.

The former makes you *think* a thing is real, whereas the latter actually makes it real.

So - who's going to start being honest about the LERM stuff in that wingmakers info. = Jesus' stuff such as making lots of loaves and fishes out of only a few loaves and fishes????

WE'RE WAIT-ING

for our actual realities to return

[Licho]

You could use GDP per industries to determine real manufacturing capacity (real by value). GDP (not GNP!) accounts only for work done in the home territory (no outsourced work in it). So if it's just assembling done here, you have very little GDP from it (very little added value). This should represent real size of various industry sectors.
Assuming that world is now globalized enough, same product should have same value in and same effect on GDP in China and in USA, so this should work.

I don't think that USA is doing bad by GDP, and it's one of the best countries in GDP/capita. Currently, the biggest economy in the world (by GDP) is EU.

[rowante]

Hmm, I wonder how many of those products listed are produced by corporations, based in the U.S, that own patents and brand names but get their products manufactured off-shore (components of, or entire product) on the cheap then bring into america to "export"?

[Licho]

Rowante, that should be represented by GNP ..

[rowante]

These articles supports JohnDever's myth #1.

http://english.people.com.cn/200212/20/ ... 8827.shtml
http://english.people.com.cn/200208/06/ ... 0969.shtml
http://www.asianlabour.org/archives/000511.php

In fact propagating this myth probably enables manufacturers in the U.S. to squeeze workers, lowering wages and increasing work hours. Thus continuing a trend from the past two decades.

http://www.isreview.org/issues/12/global_myths.shtml

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he era of "concessions bargaining" had begun--backed by the threat of outright union busting. President Reagan's firing of 11,000 air-traffic controllers in 1981 spurred the employers on. By 1987, in the midst of an economic recovery, three-quarters of all contracts covering 1,000 or more workers contained concessions. For manufacturing workers, the figure was 90 percent.12 But concessions didn't stop job losses. The United Steelworkers of America and the UAW have seen their membership cut virtually in half over the last 20 years. By 1994, Business Week could comment, "[O]ver the past dozen years, U.S. industry has conducted one of the most successful anti-union wars ever, illegally firing thousands of workers for exercising their right to organize. To ease up now, many executives feel, would be to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."13 They didn't ease up: the number of workers represented by unions fell from 33 percent in the 1950s to less than 29 percent in 1979 to about 14 percent today, despite a modest gain in 1999. Only 10 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.


The employers' offensive continued into the recovery of the 1990s. Real wages have averaged just a 0.2 percent increase per year, and companies have continued to wipe out well-paying jobs. The vast majority of these job cuts had nothing to do with imports or globalization. Rather, they were the products of endless restructuring by management to reduce costs wherever possible. Often, these cuts followed huge mergers, as when Citibank merged with Travelers Group to form Citigroup. In the 1990s, "downsizing quickly became the mainstay of all management strategies, the consistent response to whatever ailed a corporation," writes Joel Blau, author of a book on U.S. working conditions today.14 For example, AT&T announced 40,000 layoffs in 1996. Its main competitors aren't, of course, foreign imports but nonunion U.S. rivals like MCI Worldcom and Sprint.

[lotrfan55345]

Wouldnt PPP be an accurate repesentation also - and should be included in calculations.