Building a New Taxonomy of Manufacturing Countries

Abstract

Abstract The chapter proposes a novel approach to the categorization of manufacturing development, aimed at accounting for the major global transformations that have occurred in the organization of industrial activities in the last decades at the world level. It first addresses the way manufacturing development can be defined in order to provide a measure of the overall degree of industrialization of different countries, suggesting some specific indicators to this end. On such a basis a new taxonomy of countries according to their degree of manufacturing development is suggested. It is stressed that this does not imply that countries are bound to follow, when developing, a mechanical path leading from one group of the taxonomy to another; in such respect attention is paid to the fact that in the course of time countries can move from one group to another in both directions. Moreover, it is shown that cross-country differences in the degree of industrialization are also mirrored by differences in their institutional features.