The Role of External Demand in Manufacturing Development

Abstract

Abstract The chapter discusses the relationship between industrial development and structural change in the Globalization Age. In particular, it sets within the same framework the fact that both the sectoral concentration of activities within the manufacturing sector and the internal structure of the whole economy do change in the course of industrial development and shows that both these phenomena are characterized by important differences among different groups of countries. Such differences are claimed to depend upon the time at which industrial development has taken place. It is showed that for late industrializing countries the intra and inter-sectoral structural adjustment has been significantly faster as compared to that of those nations that built their manufacturing base earlier. This has involved in former countries an early increasing sectoral concentration of manufacturing activities as compared to those economies whose industrialization occurred previously, and an earlier decline in the manufacturing share on the total economy.