Manufacturing is back

Gotta write some English ow. I risk losing my zillions of readers in the English-speaking world and the NSA might loose track of my very interesting and strategic posts... hhhhh...

So this week's topic is manufacturing, specifically Europe's re-industrialization. By the end of 2012, the European Commission announced that manufacturing (in ther words, the whole of the manufacturing sector) must go up from current 16% to 20% GDP share in Europe.

Truth is, there has been much (perhaps too much) growing of the tertiary sector. Seen as ancillary to industry, it's a bit of a worry that this sector grows that much: manufacturing provides "real" jobs and accounts for many others along the economy's value chain as well. So no wonder the USA are striving for re-industrialization and so is Europe. Many decisions about location in the past as turned back today and much of the production process is coming back to the "developed" countries.

The two big industrial countries in the developed world are, no doubt, Japan and Germany. In this latter, the manufacture sector accounts for 22,5% of the GDP, with strong exports and huge sums being invested in innovation. Some German industries like Chemistry of Machine Engineering have export rates of above 60%. These figures are tempting to anyone...

What should we do here to get to that point? Well, it's clear that consistent policies and investments -from public sources first, then private investors will follow- are required. Long-term visions must be put into place. We have, in Catalonia, some strong points: the petrochemical sector in the south, the cluster of companies created around the Synchroton accelerator facility as well as an emergent biomedical sector in Barcelona. We must leverage on all that - and not on cutting salaries, for low wages scare high talent- to come out of the crisis reinforced as an industry location area.

In this direction goes the discourse of newly-appointed chairman of the Cercle d'Economia, Mr. Anton Costas. He specifically states that "Horizontal policies with the same stimuli for everyone have proved useless. He further favourishes vocational studies among the younger so that the industry will have enough manpower to resort to. Finally, he advocates for indirect government funding, even if this is in form of basic research. We can only hope Mr. Costas be heard from authorities...