These trends are confirmed by the rates of growth of manufacturing exports of the major exporters, as shown in Chart 3. Among the major developed industrial countries, the US experienced by far the fastest rate of manufactured export expansion. However, a number of developing countries showed dramatically high rates of export growth of nearly 20 per cent annual average over the decade. It should be noted that this cover the period from 1990 to 2000, and so includes periods like the East Asian crisis and the subsequent world economic recession, during which such export growth could be expected to have slowed down somewhat.

Chart 3 >> Click to Enlarge
 
With such rapid rates of manufacturing export growth, fears of de-industrialisation would appear to be misplaced. In any case, such high rates would suggest that employment in manufacturing would also have grown at reasonably high, or at least positive, rates, over this period. However, the UNIDO data on aggregate employment in manufacturing over the period 1985-99, as described for some countries in Chart 4, suggest a very different tendency. In fact, it turns out that in most of the countries, aggregate manufacturing employment has actually fallen, in some cases quite substantially.

Chart 4 >> Click to Enlarge
 
Among major developed countries, only the United States shows a positive rate of employment growth for aggregate manufacturing, and that too only the very low rate of 0.1 per cent per annum, which is akin to stagnation. Other developed countries show declines in manufacturing employment. But the real shock comes with the developing countries which are major manufactured exporters. Some countries like Mexico, with manufactured exports growing at nearly 20 per cent per annum, have nevertheless experienced actual declines in aggregate manufacturing employment. (The data for Brazil relate to the period 1990-95 only.)
 
In the Mexican case this is probably because the increase in maquila d'ora export-oriented employment has been outweighed by the collapse in manufacturing production for the domestic market, which has been adversely hit by imports. In other countries of Latin America as well, reasonably high rates of export growth have been accompanied by absolute declines in manufacturing employment. To some extent trade liberalisation, and the associated import penetration of domestic markets, may explain such patterns in these countries also.
 
But even the "tiger" economies of East and Southeast Asia, with very high rates of export growth, indicate rates of manufacturing employment expansion which are not all that high. For some of these countries, it is possible that the financial crisis of 1997-98 and the subsequent depression may have played a role in subdued employment growth. However, it has been noted that post-crisis rates of export expansion have necessarily been very high in this region, as the crisis-ridden countries have struggled to generate current account surpluses to counter the sudden capital outflows, and generally succeeded in this. This in turn makes it likely that export employment at least would not have slackened very much given the drive to increase exports to earn suddenly scarce foreign exchange.
 
But certainly it remains true that even in Asia, the effect of trade liberalisation in opening up domestic markets and causing employment to fall in industries catering to the domestic market, should not be underestimated. It should not be forgotten or unnoticed that one of the countries that achieved a respectable rate of increase in aggregate manufacturing employment over this period was China, where such employment increased by 4 per cent per annum. China was in fact one of the few countries in which import liberalisation was relatively limited over the decade, and much of the economy remained highly controlled.