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   Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Saturday, 26-Apr-2025 10:04:58 JST Miguel Afonso Caetano

   in reply to

   "The reason that the so-called China shock was so much more damaging in the United States was because of the nature of America’s political economy. Sweden and Finland of course faced competition from cheap Chinese imports, but their corporations kept investing in raising productivity and diversifying. This allowed them to partly fend off competition, partly by moving into new areas. Workers in these countries also enjoyed the security of an extensive welfare state and what economists call an active labor market policy.

   These workers were retrained and relocated and got help with finding new jobs. In the United States, you don’t have that. Instead you have this parasitic financial market. I think that given the US’s actual political economy, tariffs are going to deliver pain rather than gains."

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     Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Saturday, 26-Apr-2025 10:05:00 JST Miguel Afonso Caetano

     "In Finland, manufacturing accounted for 24 percent of GDP. By 1991, it had declined to 17. In Sweden, manufacturing as a share of GDP declined from 21 to 16 percent during the same period. But by the early 2000, Finland brought its manufacturing share of GDP back up to 24 percent, and Sweden raised its manufacturing share of GDP to 20 percent.

     The same trend can be observed in Singapore. Singapore experienced quite a significant decline in manufacturing in the mid-1980s, from 27 percent to 20 percent. But by the mid-2000s, it had recovered back to 27 percent. By the way, Singapore, despite what people think, is one of the most industrialized countries in the world: in terms of per capita manufacturing output, it ranks in the top five globally. There’s an interesting myth about it being a service economy.

     The most industrialized country in the world is Switzerland. You think that the Swiss are dealing in the black money from Third World dictators and selling cow bells and cuckoo clocks to American and Japanese tourists. Actually, it is literally the most industrialized country in the world, if you count in terms of manufacturing output per person.

     These countries have managed to revive their manufacturing industry, and since then they have declined a bit. But the lesson here is that these countries could do that only because they had a deliberate policy to revive manufacturing. What Donald Trump is trying to do is wishful thinking. Countries that have successfully increased their manufacturing output have deliberate policies to support manufacturing. In the Swedish and Finnish case, it also extended to retraining the workers made redundant because of the decline in traditional manufacturing sectors and then turning them into workers for new industries."

     https://jacobin.com/2025/04/tariffs-protectionism-manufacturing-industrial-policy

     #USA #Trump #Manufacturing #Reindustrialization #Automation #ClassWarfare #Tariffs #Protectionism #FreeTrade #IndutrialPolicy

     Steve's Place repeated this.