ABSTRACT
Manufacturing forms one of the most fascinating dimensions of the world economy. It can be distinguished from the agriculture and energy sectors because of the way in which it is so much more divorced from the world of nature. This is not to say that it does not utilize the materials of nature. It is simply that manufacturing involves a scale and type of resource conversion which creates a production dimension all of its own. Under capitalism, moreover, this aspect has developed an acuteness that it might not otherwise have possessed. This is perhaps most vividly expressed in the high concentration of world manufacturing production ( excluding the centrally planned e0)nomies) in western Europe and North America. And the apotheosis of the pattern is surely represented in Japan: a diminutive island state, bereft of major natural resources, and yet by 1985 able to
account for roughly 15 per cent of world manufacturing output, exclusive of the CPEs.
