Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Global Manufacturing Growth

I mentioned in class on Wednesday that, in spite of the “Great Recession”, global growth was stronger in the past decade than ever before.

And. it’s ramping up again.

The piece entitled “Manufacturing Gains Circle the Globe” from the February 2, 2011 issue of The Wall Street Journal has an excellent graphic showing manufacturing growth that has been sustained for going on 2 years now in a wide selection of countries.

The data source used for that is an interesting one. It’s put together by the Institute for Supply Management. It is an index of the sentiment of supply managers about the current business climate: it comes out monthly and is scaled so that above 50 is good and below 50 is bad. At least in manufacturing, they assert that the economy hasn’t been this strong since 2004.

And … the article briefly mentions that global manufacturing strength is contributing to inflationary pressures coming from commodities.

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