In the closing years of the 2oth century, the world price of the steel industry's biggest single product-hot rolled coil, the steel for car bodies-plunged from $460 to $260 a ton. Yet these were boom years in America and prosperous times in most of continental Europe, with automobile production setting records. The steel industry's experience is typical of manufacturing as a whole. Between 1960 and 1999, both manufacturing's share in America's GDP and its share of total employment roughly halved, to around the 15% mark. Yet in the same 40 years manufacturing's physical output doubled or tripled. In 1960, manufacturing was the centre of the American economy, and of the economies of all other developed countries. By 2000, as a contributor to GDP it was easily outranked by the financial sector.
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