De-Industrialisation- Re-Industrialisation in the Fashion Industry
, Gildas Minvielle —
The current economic crisis has had the unexpected effect of reaffirming the importance of industry in the economy. Countries like Germany, having chosen the industry- based growth model1 are doing much better than the countries that went down the service industry road.
Despite popular belief, Western economies are in fact industrial: the consumption and production of industrial goods has never stopped growing, by about 50% over the past twenty years. While we are indeed seeing a structural decrease in industry’s share of national wealth, this is for the most part due to the drop in relative prices for industrial products and the externalisation of a huge number of services provided to industrial businesses.