Surprisingly, less developed economies fare even worse over the same period, with Brazil enduring a 20 per cent decline in industrial employment and Japan 16 per cent. Perhaps most impressive of all is China which, in the process of becoming the world’s leading manufacturer, lost 16 million industrial jobs. As one journal observed, ‘though it is of course easy to demonstrate that plenty of industrial production still takes place, and that this is not only in important exporter nations such as China, the share of workers actually employed in manufacture has now been declining for almost two
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