It is the secondary sector. The primary sector extracts or grows raw materials — iron ore, oil, cotton, timber, crops. The secondary sector transforms them into steel, cars, phones, clothing, chemicals and processed food. The tertiary sector (services) then sells and moves them.
Three inputs are always needed:
Two big truths about the map: manufacturing has never been spread evenly (it always clusters), and its map is not fixed — over ~50 years it has shifted from the West to emerging Asia.
Read the numbers: manufacturing is only ~15–17% of global GDP (World Bank) — a minority, because services dominate rich economies. But China is now the world's largest manufacturer by output (it overtook the USA around 2010), and manufacturing is ~26–28% of China's own GDP — far higher than the West's ~10–12%. In high-income countries the share is stable-to-falling. Quote figures as approximate and name the source.
| # | Country | Output (value added) | % of world |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | $4.66 tn | 27.7% |
| 2 | United States | $2.91 tn | 17.3% |
| 3 | Japan | $867 bn | 5.2% |
| 4 | Germany | $830 bn | 4.9% |
| 5 | India | $490 bn | 2.9% |
| 6 | South Korea | $416 bn | 2.5% |
| 7 | Mexico | $364 bn | 2.2% |
| 8 | Italy | $345 bn | 2.1% |
Despite globalisation, manufacturing is highly concentrated. Four zones make most of the world's goods:
What they share: mid-latitude locations, coasts & ports, large cities & markets, skilled labour, energy and capital.
Historic core = NE & Great Lakes "Manufacturing Belt"; now diversified, with growth in the US South & Mexico. Signature: cars, aerospace, machinery.
The "Blue Banana" — England → Benelux → German Rhinelands → N Italy. Signature: high-value machinery, vehicles, chemicals, precision goods.
China, Japan & S Korea — the world's largest region. Signature: electronics, vehicles, shipbuilding, steel at massive scale.
India & neighbours — fastest-growing. Signature: textiles, pharmaceuticals, vehicles, increasingly electronics.
All four zones cluster in the Northern-Hemisphere mid-latitudes, not spread evenly. Suggest two reasons manufacturing concentrates there — and one reason a region might lose its cluster over time.
Each stage changed the geography: craft workshops sat near the buyer; the Industrial Revolution tied factories to coalfields & ports; mass production favoured big cities with cheap land & labour; today's automated, globally-networked production lets firms locate almost anywhere and ship parts worldwide.
Two changes matter most for the map: automation (fewer workers per unit) and global supply chains (a single product's parts cross many borders before assembly).
The north-east USA & Great Lakes were the country's industrial heartland — the "Manufacturing Belt" — booming on steel & cars into the mid-1900s. Cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland & Buffalo grew rich on heavy industry.
From the 1970s it went into steep decline — deindustrialisation. Three causes worked together:
Consequences: mass job losses, falling city populations, and "hollowed-out" towns full of derelict factories and abandoned homes — the "rust".
As you watch, note one cause and one consequence of the decline for your notebook.
Deindustrialisation brought real hardship to Rust Belt communities. Whose responsibility is it to help a region when its industry moves overseas — the companies, the government, or no-one? Justify your view.
Zhengzhou, in Henan Province, central China, shows where manufacturing moved to. Its huge Foxconn complex — nicknamed "iPhone City" — assembles the bulk of the world's iPhones, employing around 200,000 workers at peak, with its own dormitories, canteens and shops.
Why here?
One factory-city captures how jobs and output shifted to emerging Asia as they left the West — the mirror image of the Rust Belt.
Note why so much production concentrated in one Chinese city — and why Apple now wants to spread it out.
The West · an older core · jobs lost to automation & offshoring · population fell.
Emerging Asia · a new hub · jobs gained from the same shift · population grew.
They are two ends of the same process. What does comparing them reveal that studying either place alone would miss?
A phone might be designed in California, use chips from Taiwan & South Korea, be assembled in China, and sold worldwide. The core keeps the high-value work (and most of the profit); the periphery does the labour-intensive assembly.
Enabled by: globalisation, cheap container shipping, and instant communication.
The NIDL gives consumers cheap goods, but can mean low wages and poor conditions for the workers who assemble them. Is the global factory system fair? Argue one side with a reason.
"Explain how the spatial pattern of manufacturing has changed over the past 50 years, and analyse the processes that produced this change." (~600 words)