An advance copy of Peter Marsh’s forthcoming [amazon_link id=”0300117779″ target=”_blank” ]The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalization and the End of Mass Production[/amazon_link] has landed on my desk, and it looks tantalizing. This dreary grey constant rain (known as a drought here in southern England) has sent me to the new Donna Leon novel, [amazon_link id=”0434021601″ target=”_blank” ]Beastly Things,[/amazon_link] for some comfort reading, but as soon as I’ve read that I’ll turn to the Marsh book.

Paging through it, I spotted a chart showing the share of world manufacturing output accounted for by the leading industrial economies. The proportions are:

China 19.4%, US 18.2%, Japan 10.9%, Germany 6.1%, Italy 3.1%, Brazil 2.7%, S Korea 2.6%, India 2.5%, France 2.4%, UK 2.3%

It was a bit of a surprise that the UK featured at all, so much do we talk down our manufacturing sector, and also that we fare as well as France, where they obviously talk up manufacturing instead. I would have expected S Korea to rank a bit higher. Italy is another surprise, ahead of France and the UK by a bit. Russia is striking by its absence, a resource-based economy. Indonesia and Turkey are presumably climbing fast from a low base. Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading it.

[amazon_image id=”0300117779″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The New Industrial Revolution: Consumers, Globalization and the End of Mass Production[/amazon_image]