Here’s a visualization of manufacturing output by country in 2018.
In 2024, the Chinese produced $5.65 trillion worth of manufactured outputs (or $4.62 in 2018 dollars). The U.S. in 2024 produced, in 2017 dollars, $2.38 trillion worth of manufactured outputs – which, when converted into 2024 dollars, is $2.98 trillion worth of manufactured outputs.
The United States is still the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy.
My former student Robyn Weaving did some research for me recently into different countries’ per-capita manufacturing output. Excluding all countries with a population in 2025 of less than one million, on a per-capita basis the U.S. is the country with the world’s 11th-largest manufacturing output. China ranks 28th, with per-capita manufacturing output of only half that of the United States.
The top 50 countries (with populations of one million or more) ranked by per-capita manufacturing output are here. Although expressed in 2015 dollars, these figures are for 2023 and come from this United Nations data source.
Note that only one of the countries – Japan – that rank above the U.S. in per-capita manufacturing output has a population of more than 100 million. Five of the top-ten countries have populations of less than 10 million.
Make of this information what you will, but these data strike me as giving lie to two incessantly chanted claims – one, that we Americans “don’t make things anymore,” and two, that China is wiping the floor with the U.S. on the manufacturing front. And this lie seems further exposed when these data are combined with the fact that, as Colin Grabow summarizes:
The country [U.S.] ranks number one in real manufacturing value-added per worker by a large margin. With value-added of over $141,000 per worker in 2019, the United States bested second-ranked South Korea by over $44,000. The gap with China was over $120,000 per worker.
