Joe Studwell: belief

Transcript context

…But there’re a lot of developing nations around the world — you could look at India, you could look at Pakistan, even Thailand — where manufacturing has not taken off the way one might have wanted. There’re just major forces operating against it. And in the US, manufacturing employment was once 37 percent of the workforce; now it’s 7 percent to 8 percent. It just seems like it’s swimming upstream for Africa — which again, has quite expensive energy — to think it will do that well. And again, South Africa had very good technology, pretty high state capacity. I don’t see the alternate world state where a wiser ANC would have made that work. Well, oddly enough, before the end of Apartheid, the manufacturing performance of South Africa was really not bad at all, with classic industrial policy, quite high levels of protection, and so forth. I think that demand for manufactured goods will continue to be high around the world, and the labor cost will continue to be a prime determinant of where producers go for low value-added goods. So, I think that the opportunity is there for African countries. But say there’re transportation costs internally, energy costs, political order uncertainty. Where’s the place where people really want to put all these manufacturing firms?…

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