… is from page 8 of Alecia Waite Cassidy’s, Edward Tower’s, and Xiaolu Wang’s important September 2016 data-rich paper, “Manufacturing Fetishism: The Neo-Mercantilist Preoccupation with Protecting Manufacturing”:
There is no robust positive relationship between manufacturing share [of GDP] and per capita GDP.
DBx: This finding will shock – or even be denied – by those many protectionists, such as Oren Cass, who fetishize manufacturing. Yet this finding, in fact, is no more shocking or worrying than would have been a finding from a century ago that “there is no robust positive relationship between agriculture’s share of GDP and per capita GDP.”
