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Lee M. LLoyd's avatar

There is one very boring, but nonetheless important, factor I feel you left out, and that is supply chain speed and efficiency. As someone who works in manufacturing, I have to say it is hard to overstate what a huge difference this makes. In the US (and to be fair manufacturing centers in China as well), if you break a tool, or need supplies, or have to get a replacement part, you go on a website, order what you need, and it will either be here tomorrow, or if you need it faster than that, you can often drive over to the warehouse and pick it up today.

In most other countries it just doesn't work that way. You have to contact your dealer, who may or may not have an up to date inventory on their website. You tell the sales rep. what you need, and they will get back to you with a quote, which will probably take at least a day, maybe as much as a week to get. Then you approve the quote. They send the order to their distributior, and then they give you an ETA of when you can expect it. All in all, something that is one or two days in the US, can end up taking weeks in many other countries.

This might sound like a simple inconvenience, and not something that is going to make a major difference in GDP, but if you are prototyping a new product, or running a job shop that handles multiple customer orders, this simple issue can dramatically lengthen time tables on production. A project that could realistically a week to turn around a prototype with a modern, responsive, supply chain, can easily stretch out to several months if you have to wait for parts and supplies. Spread that out over the entire economy, and it is a measurable hit to overall productivity.

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Adam Ciernicki's avatar

Wait... so first you explain how American GDP is a one giant dot.com bubble...and then you claim EUR is "falling off"? It reminds me of articles about 10 yrs ago describing how "rich" Russia is because of its GDP growth. Pathetic.

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