South By North Strategies, Ltd.

A long, front-page story in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times explored “the iPhone economy,” one in which popular products invented in the United States are manufactured not by American industrial employees but by those based overseas and employed by foreign contract manufacturers. According to the article, the basic rationale for this development is simple:

To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.

While the article is wroth reading in full, it doesn’t clearly show the policy choices–choices made by governments in both the United States and abroad–that shape the location of manufacturing sites and instead gives the impression that the choices made by firms like Apple somehow are inevitable.

Dean Baker immediately pointed out one dynamic missing from the story:

Remarkably, the piece never once mentions exchange rates. This is a major determinant of relative prices. If the dollar rises by 30 percent against other currencies, as it did in the late 90s, then it becomes 30 percent more expensive to produce goods in the United States relative to other countries. This rise in the value of the dollar was the major factor behind the explosion in the trade deficit at the end of the 90s and at the beginning of the last decade.
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The dollar is also supposed to be the mechanism through which trade is rebalanced. Large trade deficits are supposed to cause currencies to fall in value. This leads their deficits to move back toward balance. This has not happened to any significant extent with the United States in the last decade in large part because foreign governments have placed a high priority on accumulating large amounts of dollars, buying up trillions of dollars of U.S. government debt and other dollar denominated assets. If the dollar were allowed to fall to a level consistent with more balanced trade, then many manufacturing jobs would return to the United States.

Naked Capitalism, meanwhile, identified a number of other omissions, including the following:

The problem with using the microcosm to illustrate the macrocosm is you need to choose the right microcosm. The danger in using the iPhone example is that (as I have discussed at length in prior posts) there are quite a few industries in which the case for offshoring and outsourcing is not compelling, particularly if you allow for the increased risk of extended supply chains, as Apple itself learned in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. But even in those cases, it still has the effect of transferring income from middle level and factory workers to the top brass. Thus the iPhone/consumer electronics example will have the effect of giving other businesses a free pass.

In a much more supportive analysis of the piece, Free Exchange noted the aggressive policy role in supporting manufacturing played by Asian countries like China–a role that the United States government ceased playing many years ago:

It’s not necessary to talk about this as an entirely organic process. Unquestionably, Asian governments aggressively pursued manufacturing and subsidised it heavily, both directly and through advantageous exchange rates. As the story points out, Asia has capitalised on other advantages, as well. Cheap labour is one. More flexible land-use, labour, and environmental rules are another; China can erect a massive operation in no time at all, staffed with compliant labour and with little concern about the impact of the factory on watersheds, air quality, and traffic. Skill supply seems to matter as well. China is churning out engineers with basic technical competence (but less, it appears, than a bachelor’s degree) by the hundreds of thousands. It would be incorrect to point to any one of these characteristics as the driving force behind the global shift. Rather, these are self-reinforcing factors within a global economy that has multiple stable equilibria. After some level of Asian development and integration, it became more attractive for manufacturers to locate there as more manufacturers located there.