In defence of manufacturing: 

In defence of manufacturing: 

Context

• Low-skill manufacturing jobs are essential for easing the fundamental economic shifts that are underway globally. This opinion comes amidst the fall in seen in a number of macro- economic indicators in India in the past few months.

Potential of monetizing small-scale entrepreneurship

• Economic research has consistently shown that innovation drives economic growth.
• It boosts allocative efficiency of resources,
• fosters competition,
• ·boosts trade through product diversity and
• helps provide low-cost solutions to human development challenges.
• Start-ups and small businesses are some of the strongest repositories of the entrepreneurship that drives innovation
• In general, much of the vital innovation comes from start-ups and small businesses that are snapped up by larger companies to acquire patents.

Costs of paying less attention to low-skill jobs

• There are very real social and political costs for paying insufficient attention to accessible low-skill manufacturing jobs.
• The opioid crisis that has swept the US Rust Belt points to the consequences of economic alienation among blue-collar manufacturing workers on a micro level.
• In India, the sixth economic census, conducted between January 2013 and April 2014, shows that the average employment size of an economic establishment in India is 2.24—the fourth consecutive census of decline. In such a scenario, focusing on low-skill manufacturing jobs in large enterprises becomes more important than ever.

Way forward

• Large-scale manufacturing may see a decline over this century  this will cause decades of economic and social pain.
• That is why governments cannot afford to lose focus on large-scale manufacturing.
• Hence, improving human capital to meet the demands of the transforming economy is a long term challenge—and in the interim, those vanishing low-skill jobs are imperative for providing a soft landing to the economic shift.