Manufacturing

The UK government needs to make a choice: competitiveness and growth or heavy-handed regulation in the service of social policy. It can have one but not both.

U.S. manufacturing productivity has been in decline for more than a decade. If policymakers don’t do more to turn that around, real wages will stagnate and U.S. manufacturers will increasingly find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Watch now for a conversation detailing the effect and importance of Manufacturing USA, and emphasizing the importance of sustained investment in the program to policymakers.

China accounted for 35 percent of global manufacturing as of 2023. The United States and Western allies should launch a global competition to establish competing manufacturing hubs in countries that commit to reforming restrictive regulations, reducing corruption, boosting skill development, and ensuring adequate financial incentives and infrastructure.

There may be no more important question for the West’s competitive position in advanced industries than whether China is becoming a rival innovator. While the evidence suggests it hasn’t yet taken the overall lead, it has pulled ahead in certain areas, and in many others Chinese firms will likely equal or surpass Western firms within a decade or so.

Building a new fab in Asia is 30 percent cheaper than building one in the United States. So, the key point of CHIPS was not to subsidize companies by giving them money to undertake investments they would have made anyway. It was to remove the rationale for making those investments in Asia instead of in the United States.

The use of cloud computing by firms has been proven to increase productivity and innovation and to lower costs.

China stands about five years behind global leaders in high-volume manufacturing of leading-edge logic semiconductor chips, and continues to trail in memory chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, although Chinese firms have made inroads in semiconductor design and production of legacy semiconductor chips.

The comparison of the Census Bureau’s manufacturing data from 2002 to 2022 reveals a stark and depressing reality: in just two decades, the number of manufacturing firms fell, jobs diminished, payroll failed to keep pace with national growth, and productivity stalled.

Stephen Ezell delivers a featured presentation at the 2024 national meeting of the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIMBL).