Category: manufacturing
The Geography of Manufacturing’s Digital Revolution: Are the Jobs Coming Back?
We’ve been following the rise of 3-D printing and how it will revolutionize manufacturing. The Economist has some more thoughts on the subject, particularly how it will affect the location of manufacturing jobs: The revolution will affect not only how things are made, but where. Factories used to move to low-wage countries to curb labour [...]
Fordism Comes to Asia (& How it Will Change the Global Economy)
WorldCrunch has an interesting piece by Jean-Marc Vittori from Les Echos on how labor costs are rising in Asia and how that will affect the global economy. Here is the crux of his argument: We need to rethink how we view the world economy. The huge gap between European and Asian salaries is reducing at [...]
Will India be the Next Manufacturing Powerhouse?
That is the question explored in the latest McKinsey Quarterly: To be sure, global economic growth is poised to create opportunities for low-cost manufacturers everywhere: by 2015 the market for manufactured goods from low-cost countries will more than double, to nearly $8 trillion a year. China will probably capture much of the growth. Still, we [...]
Is the Skills Gap Slowing Manufacturing Growth?
That’s the argument made by Joshua Brown at the Christian Science Monitor site: Wells Fargo‘s Chief Economist is out with a look at the skills mismatch between what manufacturers need versus what the labor force in America can actually do. John Silvia notes that this mismatch is nothing new even as it seems more and [...]
Innovation, Collaboration & Big Pharma
BBC Global Business hosted an interesting discussion of how major pharmaceutical companies will be pursuing R&D in the 21st Century, given the lapse of patent protection for a major generation of drugs and changes in the field of medicine. Participants include Freida Lewis Hall, Chief Medical Officer of Pfizer, Patrick Flochel, a partner in Ernst [...]
Competing for Manufacturing Jobs: Racing into the Darkness?
In case you missed it, Sunday’s New York Times had a front-page story on why the US has such a hard time competing for manufacturing jobs. According to the article, here is a typical description of the problem as seen by Apple: Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. [...]
