Ha-Joon Chang - 23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism

There are some service activities, such as banking, which have greater scope for productivity increase than other services. However, as revealed by the 2008 financial crisis, much of the productivity growth in those activities was due not to a real rise in their productivity (e.g., reduction in trading costs due to better computers) but to financial innovations that obscured (rather than genuinely reduced) the riskiness of financial assets, thereby allowing the financial sector to grow at an unsustainably rapid rate ( see Thing 22 ).

To sum up, the fall in the share of manufacturing in total output in the rich countries is not largely due to the fall in (relative) demand for manufactured goods, as many people think. Nor is it due mainly to the rise of manufactured exports from China and other developing countries, although that has had big impacts on some sectors. It is instead the falling relative prices of the manufactured goods due to faster growth in productivity in the manufacturing sector that is the main driver of the de-industrialization process. Thus, while the citizens of the rich countries may be living in post-industrial societies in terms of their employment , the importance of manufacturing in terms of production in those economies has not been diminished to the extent that we can declare a post-industrial age.

But if de-industrialization is due to the very dynamism of a country’s manufacturing sector, isn’t it a good thing?

Not necessarily. The fact that de-industrialization is mainly caused by the comparative dynamism of the manufacturing sector vis-à-vis the service sector does not tell us anything about how well it is doing compared to its counterparts in other countries. If a country’s manufacturing sector has slower productivity growth than its counterparts in other countries, it will become internationally uncompetitive, leading to balance of payments problems in the short run and falling standards of living in the long term. In other words, de-industrialization may be accompanied by either economic success or failure. Countries should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that de-industrialization is due to comparative dynamism of the manufacturing sector, as even a manufacturing sector that is very undynamic by international standards can be (and usually is) more dynamic than the service sector of the same country.

Whether or not a country’s manufacturing sector is dynamic by international standards, the shrinkage of the relative weight of the manufacturing sector has a negative impact on productivity growth. As the economy becomes dominated by the service sector, where productivity growth is slower, productivity growth for the whole economy will slow down. Unless we believe (as some do) that the countries experiencing de-industrialization are now rich enough not to need more productivity growth, productivity slowdown is something that countries should get worried about – or at least reconcile themselves to.

De-industrialization also has a negative effect on a country’s balance of payments because services are inherently more difficult to export than manufactured goods. A balance of payments deficit means that the country cannot ‘pay its way’ in the world. Of course, a country can plug the hole through foreign borrowing for a while, but eventually it will have to lower the value of its currency, thereby reducing its ability to import and thus its living standard.

At the root of the low ‘tradability’ of services lies the fact that, unlike manufactured goods that can be shipped anywhere in the world, most services require their providers and consumers to be in the same location. No one has yet invented ways to provide a haircut or house-cleaning long-distance. Obviously, this problem will be solved if the service provider (the hairdresser or the cleaner in the above examples) can move to the customer’s country, but that in most cases means immigration, which most countries restrict heavily ( see Thing 3 ). Given this, a rising share of services in the economy means that the country, other things being equal, will have lower export earnings. Unless the exports of manufactured goods rise disproportionately, the country won’t be able to pay for the same amount of imports as before. If its de-industrialization is of a negative kind accompanied by weakening international competitiveness, the balance of payments problem could be even more serious, as the manufacturing sector then won’t be able to increase its exports.

Not all services are equally non-tradable. The knowledge-based services that I mentioned earlier – banking, consulting, engineering, and so on – are highly tradable. For example, in Britain since the 1990s, exports of knowledge-based services have played a crucial role in plugging the balance of payments gap left behind by de-industrialization (and the fall in North Sea oil exports, which had enabled the country – just – to survive the negative balance of payments consequences of de-industrialization during the 1980s).

However, even in Britain, which is most advanced in the exports of these knowledge-based services, the balance of payments surplus generated by those services is well below 4 per cent of GDP, just enough to cover the country’s manufacturing trade deficits. With the likely strengthening of global financial regulation as a consequence of the 2008 world financial crisis, it is unlikely that Britain can maintain this level of trade surplus in finance and other knowledge-based services in the future. In the case of the US, supposedly another model post-industrial economy, the trade surplus in knowledge-based services is actually less than 1 per cent of GDP – nowhere near enough to make up for its manufacturing trade deficits, which are around 4 per cent of GDP. [28] B. Rowthorn and K. Coutts, ‘De-industrialisation and the balance of payments in advanced economies’, Cambridge Journal of Economics , 2004, vol. 28, no. 5. The US has been able to maintain such a large manufacturing trade deficit only because it could borrow heavily from abroad – an ability that can only shrink in the coming years, given the changes in the world economy – and not because the service sector stepped in to fill the gap, as in the British case. Moreover, it is questionable whether the strengths of the US and Britain in the knowledge-based services can be maintained over time. In services such as engineering and design, where insights gained from the production process are crucial, a continuous shrinkage of the industrial base will lead to a decline in the quality of their (service) products and a consequent loss in export earnings.

If Britain and the US – two countries that are supposed to be the most developed in the knowledge-based services – are unlikely to meet their balance of payments needs in the long run through the exports of these services, it is highly unlikely that other countries can.

Believing de-industrialization to be the result of the change of our engine of growth from manufacturing to services, some have argued that developing countries can largely skip industrialization and move directly to the service economy. Especially with the rise of service offshoring, this view has become very popular among some observers of India. Forget all those polluting industries, they say, why not go from agriculture to services directly? If China is the workshop of the world, the argument goes, India should try to become the ‘office of the world’.

However, it is a fantasy to think that a poor country can develop mainly on the basis of the service sector. As pointed out earlier, the manufacturing sector has an inherently faster productivity growth than the service sector. To be sure, there are some service industries that have rapid productivity growth potential, notably the knowledge-based services that I mentioned above. However, these are service activities that mainly serve manufacturing firms, so it is very difficult to develop those industries without first developing a strong manufacturing base. If you base your development largely on services from early on, your longterm productivity growth rate is going to be much slower than when you base it on manufacturing.