How Does Britain Stand as a Manufacturing Power Among the Group of Seven Advanced Industrial Nations ?

After World War Two Britain was probably the world's third-largest industrial power--and after the U.S., the second such power in the non-Communist world by a long way.* (Indeed, in 1948 Britain accounted for almost a quarter of world manufacturing exports.) This was, admittedly, a matter of the weakness of most of its rivals in the immediate post-war years more than Britain's strength. (Even before the war Britain had long been falling behind the competition, while the war years saw its plant and infrastructure badly run down, and its aftermath financial bankruptcy that made rectifying the situation difficult.) And the situation did not last as those others recovered, and outstripped Britain, with the U.S. extending its lead, and others not only catching Britain up but overtaking it. Thus was there a German miracle, and a Japanese miracle, while France had its "Les Trente Glorieuses," and Italy boomed similarly. And even in the less booming times that followed many of the others (particularly Germany and Japan) went on doing better, all as still other powers in their turn moved up the ranks--notably South Korea which, from the standpoint of total manufacturing output ($459 billion), was of 2018 behind, among the G-7, only the U.S. ($2.33 trillion), Japan ($1.04 trillion) and Germany ($796 billion) to go by the United Nations' National Accounts data.

The result is that among the original G-7 Britain has slipped from the second to the sixth place in aggregate output, ahead only of Canada ($256 billion to $170 billion), which has a population not much more than half Britain's size (37 million to Britain's 67 million), while in terms of per capita output it is at number seven ($3800)--and if we were to give South Korea a seat at the table Britain would drop out of the seven and end up in eighth place, with just half the U.S. level of per capita output ($7100), and well under half the per capita output of Germany ($9600), South Korea ($9000) and Japan ($8200) in the aforementioned year.

All this being the case it can seem that Britain's standing as a manufacturing power has receded greatly, sufficiently so that its G-7 membership can, like its United Nations' Security Council membership, seem a legacy of past rather than present capacity (and harder to justify as other nations are left out, like South Korea in the G-7 case). Indeed, after four decades of Britain not merely lagging others' progress, but seeing its output decline, Britain is now so far down in the "league tables" that countries that would still normally be regarded as developing are overtaking it--with China a signal example. In the 1950s its slogan with regard to industrial development was "Exceeding UK, Catching up USA." China would seem to have attained that first object sometime in the 1970s, certainly to go by Paul Bairoch's much-cited data set (which as of 1980 gives China a 5.2 percent share of world output, against Britain's 4 percent). That was, of course, a matter of a very low level of "per capita" industrialization in a country with almost eighteen times' Britain's population (1 billion to 56 million). However, it now looks as if China, which now accounts for perhaps as much as a third of world production, while Britain accounts for less than 2 percent of it, is now in the process of overtaking Britain's output in per capita terms as well. Where in 2004 China's per capita manufacturing output was a mere 11 percent of Britain's, it was 71 percent of that figure in 2018--and 76 percent of it in 2020 ($2700 to $3500 in current U.S. dollars).

One can easily picture China closing the gap before the end of the decade, even were its growth to continue slowing--while if one takes the common view that China's currency has been undervalued, and Britain's overvalued, it may even be the case that China has already done so.

* Paul Bairoch's figures have Britain, circa 1953, if only about three-quarters as big a producer as the Soviet Union, three times as industrialized in per capita terms--and about one-and-a-half times as industrialized as Germany.