Europe’s weakest point in the game of manufactures is that its labor cost disconnects between high and low are not as wide as they are in Asia, so the Europeans are not as economically competitive in products that benefit from more varied labor structures. The spread between advanced Germany and less industrialized Turkey is $46K versus $9K, while the Japanese-Vietnamese differential is $40K versus $2.7K. Europe really doesn’t have a “low end” in the Asian sense, so a great number of products that rely upon low wages for at least part of their cost structure—and that’s everything from basic
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