The Economic Forces Behind Deindustrialization: An Empirical Investigation

The purpose of this paper is to provide an in-depth study of deindustrialization and to systematically analyze the reasons why the world’s most economically successful countries have experienced a sharp decline in relative manufacturing employment over the last decades. A large strand of empirical literature on deindustrialization aims at quantifying the relative importance of the economic forces behind deindustrialization, especially of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors. While this study does not contradict the widespread belief that internal factors are quantitatively more important in explaining deindustrialization in advanced countries taken as a whole, our results, based on both static and dynamic techniques and panel data on 18 OECD countries from 1977 to 2007, however suggest that the role of globalization may be revised upwards when resorting to appropriate and well-defined indicators of trade in manufactures.