Is Deindustrialization a Myth? Capital Mobility versus Absorptive Capacity in the U.S. Economy

Barry Bluestone

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1984, vol. 475, issue 1, 39-51

Abstract: The current debate concerning the necessity and propriety of establishing an industrial policy for the United States turns, to a significant extent, on the question of whether the nation is undergoing deindustrialization. Using data on aggregate trends in manufacturing employment, Robert Z. Lawrence and others at the Brookings Institution claim that despite widespread plant closings during the 1970s, most employment loss was cyclical in nature and not permanent. In this article, new evidence on individual industries and regions is explored to test again the deindustrialization thesis. The conclusion of the current study is that while aggregate manufacturing employment has remained constant over the past decade, substantial permanent job losses have occurred in key basic industries and in particular regions of the nation. These employment losses pose a serious problem because the economy generally fails to provide comparable jobs in other sectors that can absorb the workers who become displaced.

Date: 1984
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716284475001004 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:475:y:1984:i:1:p:39-51

DOI: 10.1177/0002716284475001004

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().