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Hewlett-Packard, which turns out over 50 million computers a year through its own plants and subcontractors, makes many of its larger desktop personal computers in such higher-cost areas as Indianapolis and Tokyo to save on fuel costs and to serve business buyers rapidly.

The problems in India were cultural, bureaucratic and practical.

Mr. Winthrop says American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs — the reason all these companies fled in the first place — aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have largely turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers.

In 2012, the M.I.T. Forum for Supply Chain Innovation and the publication Supply Chain Digest conducted a joint survey of 340 of their members. The survey found that one-third of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering moving some production to the United States, and about 15 percent of the respondents said they had already decided to do so.

For several months, IBM has been seeking to sell its chip-manufacturing operations

The most likely buyer is GlobalFoundries, a large contract chip manufacturer, the person said, for a price of probably less than $2 billion.

Ms. Rometty stated that while IBM’s priorities were in fields like data analytics and cloud computing, and it had agreed to sell its industry-standard computer server business to Lenovo of China for $2.3 billion, she added: “But let me be clear — we are not exiting hardware.”

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Bennett Model helped pioneer the exporting of garments from China in 1975, the year before Mao Zedong died,

Western executives are checking on potential new suppliers in southern Vietnam, central Cambodia and the hinterlands of Java in Indonesia.

Virtually all of the vehicles sold in China are manufactured either by Chinese automakers or, more often, by multinationals in joint manufacturing ventures with Chinese automakers. Most Chinese automakers in turn are owned by local governments that also have considerable control over local courts, making the automakers nearly invulnerable to private litigation.

Instead of basking in the reflected glory of a prize winner funded by European grants, she said she had to listen to a speech attacking the red-tape and bureaucracy - and "generally embarrassing the hell out of me".

Jan Muehlfeit, chairman of Microsoft Europe, explained what was profoundly different about these new digital industries - that they expand at a speed and scale that would have been impossible in the traditional manufacturing industries. Governments trying to respond to such quicksilver businesses needed to ensure that young people were well-educated, creative and adaptable, he said.

Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum

These are headed for Mexico, to Navistar’s stamping plant there.Continue reading the main story

Now, they are trying to respond, making lighter, stronger steel in a bid to retain one of their most important customers, the automakers.

Africa’s Structural Transformation Challenge

As researchers at the African Center for Economic Transformation in Accra, Ghana, put it, the continent is “growing rapidly, transforming slowly.”

Fewer than 10% of African workers find jobs in manufacturing, and among those only a tiny fraction – as low as one-tenth – are employed in modern, formal firms with adequate technology. Distressingly, there has been very little improvement in this regard, despite high growth rates. In fact, Sub-Saharan Africa is less industrialized today than it was in the 1980’s. Private investment in modern industries, especially non-resource tradables, has not increased, and remains too low to sustain structural transformation.

Are National Champions Really Winners?

Although the proportion of imported intermediate goods in German manufacturing exports has risen from around 19% to 30% since 1995, the globalization of value chains during this period has improved competitiveness, and dramatically increased manufacturing value.

Four years of economic turmoil and the euro zone’s highest jobless rate have made the Spanish labor market so inviting — an estimated 40 percent less expensive than those of Europe’s other biggest car-making countries, Germany and France — that Ford and Renault recently announced plans to expand their production in Spain.

Some experts say such gains in competitiveness and investment are exactly what Spain needs for its economy to recover and to remove any doubts about whether the country can remain in the euro union.

New vehicle registrations in the European Union fell 10.2 percent from a year ago, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported from Brussels,

the overall economy is expected to contract in 2013 for a second straight year.

The strategic technologies that have repeatedly transformed the market economy – from railroads to the Internet – required the construction of networks whose value in use could not be known when they were first deployed.

Consequently, innovation at the frontier depends on funding sources that are decoupled from concern for economic value;

Financial speculation has been, and remains, one required source of funding. Financial bubbles emerge wherever liquid asset markets exist. Indeed, the objects of such speculation astound the imagination: tulip bulbs, gold and silver mines, real estate, the debt of new nations, corporate securities.