Manufacturing and service expected for new jobs

Manufacturing and service expected for new jobs

To bring it all together in one place, Mr Ceder and his colleagues, in conjunction with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, late last year launched a free online service called the Materials Project to catalogue the properties of substances. By March this year it contained details of almost 20,000 different compounds.
The database is designed to allow scientists quickly to identify suitable new materials and predict how they might react together. This promises to speed up the development of new materials in manufacturing. Some new substances can take a decade or more to reach the market. “Because it takes so long, people are wary about investing in it,” says Mr Ceder. “So we have to make the process faster.”
For over 100 years, America was the world’s leading manufacturer, but now it is neck-and-neck with China. In the decade to 2010 the number of manufacturing jobs in America fell by about a third. The rise of outsourcing and offshoring and the growth of sophisticated supply chains has enabled companies the world over to use China, India and other lower-wage countries as workshops. Prompted by the global financial crisis, some Western policymakers now reckon it is about time their countries returned to making stuff in order to create jobs and prevent more manufacturing skills from being exported. That supposes two things: that manufacturing is important to a nation and its economy, and that these new forms of manufacturing will create new jobs.
There has been plenty of research to show that manufacturing is good for economies, but in recent years some economists have argued that there is nothing special about making things and that service industries can be just as productive and innovative. It is people and companies, not countries, that design, manufacture and sell products, and there are good and bad jobs in both manufacturing and services. But on average manufacturing workers do earn more, according to a report by Susan Helper of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, for the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, DC.
Manufacturing firms are also more likely than other companies to introduce new and innovative products. Manufacturing makes up only about 11% of America’s GDP, but it is responsible for 68% of domestic spending on and machinery research and development. According to Ms Helper, it provides better-paid jobs, on average, than service industries, is a big source of innovation, helps to reduce trade deficits and creates opportunities in the growing “clean” economy, such as recycling and green energy. These are all good reasons for a country to engage in it.