Manufacturing

[drplokta]

Thanks to The Register, here is a nice graph of the decline of manufacturing in the UK since 1945. You'll notice one small problem with the "decline" bit.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! But I'd love to know what we are making.

[drplokta]

Aerospace equipment, pharmaceuticals, defence equipment, cars (cars made in the UK by Japanese companies still count as UK manufacturing), TVs (ditto), etc.

[drplokta]

And lots of small stuff. For example, our fishtank was manufactured in Norfolk, and the company has a thriving export business.

[jamesb.livejournal.com]

Thats pretty awesome.
I think the UK also makes a lot of Buses. Even some Chassis' are UK Built.
IN think its only Derby now that makes Trains, for Bombardier. Thats a a real shame.

[cobrabay.livejournal.com]

In 2009, according to http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=198 it broke down as follows,

Manufacturing consists of 14 sub-sectors listed below with the percentage of the total they account for. For IoP purposes DB and DC are combined as both are small. The larger the percentage contribution, the more likely the impact on the overall manufacturing growth rate will be significant.

DA - Food, drink & tobacco (14.9%)
DB - Textiles & clothing (2.6%)
DC - Leather & leather products (0.3%)
DD - Wood & wood products (1.9%)
DE - Paper, printing & publishing (13.2%)
DF - Coke, refined petroleum & nuclear fuels (1.7%)
DG - Chemicals & man-made fibres (11.3%)
DH - Rubber & plastic products (5.0%)
DI - Non-metallic mineral products (3.6%)
DJ - Basic metals & metal products (10.9%)
DK - Machinery & equipment (8.3%)
DL - Electrical & optical equipment (11.1%)
DM - Transport equipment (10.9%)
DN - Other manufacturing (4.4%)

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[andrewducker]

So far as I can tell, that doesn't compensate for inflation.

Inflation from 1940 is about 4700%, so I'd expect the values to go from 40 to 2000, not 100.

[coth.livejournal.com]

It said it was a 2005 index in the article.

And is also fairly explicit that a computer programmer working on the manufacture of aircraft engines is counted towards the value of manufacturing as an industry.

[andrewducker]

Sorry, I meant to say that I'd expect the 1940 value to be 8 rather than 40, if it's not taking inflation into account. I got it the wrong way round in the translation from brain to fingers.

Without knowing whether the figures do take inflation into account or not it's very hard to tell if they're meaningful or not.

Inflation

[armb.livejournal.com]

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=169 says "The index is measured at base year prices (currently 2000)."

Re: Inflation

[andrewducker]

Aaaah, so any items that are sold are weighted at the price that those items would have sold for in 2000? Must be tricky for electronics, but it does make sense.

Ok, that makes me a lot happier. Thanks!

Re: Inflation

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Maybe - it's a good point.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Really? Gosh. You'd better phone the statisticians and tell them that they've overlooked this crucial yet trivial point! ;)

(the Reg forums are full of eejits making this observation as if no-one else had thought of it)

[andrewducker]

Que?

That graph would mean two different things depending on what it shows. If it shows "cost of goods produced at the time" then it's showing a massive decline in manufacturing. If it shows "cost of goods produce, normalised to a standard date" then it shows a decent improvement in manufacturing over time. All I wanted to know is which one I was looking at.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

The *default* assumption to make with datasets like this is that prices are normalised to a base year; the data isn't really any use without this.

[andrewducker]

I don't like making assumptions about data visulations, particularly not with ones that start somewhere like The Register.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

That impressive dip there appears to correspond exactly to the Thatcher years. Funny that.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Maggie left No. 10 in 1991, as I recall. According to that graph at that time production had never been higher. Funny that.

What the curve doesn't represent is the working population that is carrying out all this manufacturing -- the actual amount of manufacturing per million workers has dropped significantly, even with large amounts of modern automation and sophisticated working practices increasing the level of productivity per worker.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

I would point out that most British manufacturing these days is really high-value tech stuff like airliner wings and engines, not clothes etc. This has something to do with all that.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

British industry has always tended towards high-value high-tech manufacturing -- ships, motorcycles, cars, aircraft etc. These were especially important for export markets to garner foreign currency. New forms of tech have come into play over the years but there are fewer jobs and less manufacturing of that sort any more -- there is no indigenous British civil aircraft industry left, only a segment of Airbus Industries. No Hawker-Siddeley, no Shorts, no Avro. The British car industry is today almost all subsidiary operations of foreign-controlled businesses assembling designs and models planned abroad -- I except the smaller garden-shed operations like TVR and Morgan from this wide-brush description but even Rolls Royce Motors belongs to someone else (BMW I think?)

There is no magic in British manufacturing, nothing intrinsic in the British way of doing things that cannot be copied and replicated abroad where the wages are lower and the workers benefits less. Steel mills in Malaysia are just as computerised as the most modern plant in Britain, the schools in the Far East are producing engineers and technicians just as skilled as any graduates from British colleges and universities. In addition we've used up most of our indigenous raw materials; to make iron and steel here we have to ship iron ore from thousands of miles away. We're even running out of accessible native coal that can be used to make decent coke for blast furnaces. Shipping costs have come way down over the years but it's a lot cheaper to make steel close to the iron ore mines and ship the finished product than to ship the raw ore long distances, and so the British blast furnaces are being turned off one by one, and we don't make steel any more. We used to employ hundreds of thousands of people to do that; after nationalisation and modernisation in the 70s we employed tens of thousands to produce just as much steel. Today we employ thousands to make less steel and tomorrow hundreds or fewer.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

British industry has always tended towards high-value high-tech manufacturing -- ships, motorcycles, cars, aircraft etc.

All the industry where I was brought up concerned the entire process of taking raw cotton and turning it into clothes, not particularly high value, though it was high tech in its time. Yorkshire did the same with wool. That industry died out in the 1980s rather suddenly.

Bombardier still use the Shorts plant to make parts, and we do dominate the "building Formula One cars" sector ;-)

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

The two dips correspond to the early 80s recession and the early 90s one. They were not restricted to the UK and, as nojay points out, output rapidly recovered in both case.

The thing that got me, though is that the graph is pretty much constant after 1997 ie. the value of our manufacturing output has remained unchanged since NewLab came to power (though I'm sure there are other interpretations).

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

Don't confuse us with facts. We know the truth. It's what the Daily Mail tells us.

Be nice to know what the figures represent, but we can't have everything.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'd like to see a similar graph that was adjusted for inflation. Without that adjustment, I can't tell how valid the point is.

[drplokta]

The graph is adjusted for inflation.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see I should have read the other comments first...

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

It all depends what this mysterious 'index of production' is.

[andrewducker]

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Product.asp?vlnk=6230 might be a good start :->

[childeric.livejournal.com]

An absolute increase can be a relative decline. Show UK manufacturing output as a percentage of that of the whole world and I suspect that there will be a dramatically different picture. Not that that invalidates the point that that graph is making.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"An absolute increase can be a relative decline."

You've been looking at Apple, 1985-2003 or so, haven't you?

[evil-mogwai.livejournal.com]

Its nice to be working for two of the manufacturers in the UK... school books, teaching resources and other school equipment for one and the second makes (and also imports some) Percussion instruments.

The recent "drop" is hardly surprising considering that lending to companies has become more and more strict prior to the recession and during it.

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

That's great for the overall, long-term trend.

However, look at the recent set Statistics UK uses for this very same Index of Production:



Even allowing for how they've chopped off the bottom of the graph, the implication is The Current Troubles have knocked the UK back to the mid-1980s.