American Industry

Business Week’s cover article–Emerging Giants, the new multinational companies–addresses new companies from seemingly unlikely places such as Brazil, India, Russia and even Egypt and South Africa in industries such as farm equipment and other hard goods, aircraft and telecom services. And, we should never forget that Russia’s Gazprom is the world’s largest natural gas producer (45% of the natural gas used in Germany comes from Gazprom).

Germany and Japan were industrial powers before World War II while Korea and Japanese were well subsidized by their governments (and ours, of course) but the companies from countries with low incomes and many competitors have learned to produce value for less money. The World Bank predicts that over the next decade developing nations’ share of world gross domestic product is expecte to grow from one-fifth to one-third. Where does this leave the U.S.?

Regards,
Marge