While it’s still cheaper to build things in China, those famously low Chinese wages have risen in recent years. “We reached the point where we could offset a portion of those labor costs by saving on logistics,” Parker says.
U.S. firms that have long operated abroad are making similar moves: Caterpillar, GE and Ford are among those that have announced that they’re shifting some manufacturing operations back to the United States. And economists are now debating whether these stories are a blip — or whether they signal the beginning of a major renaissances for American manufacturing.
It’s easy to be skeptical. So far, the effect on jobs has been modest. Since January 2010, the United States has added 520,000 manufacturing jobs — and of those, just 50,000 have come from overseas firms moving here, according to the Reshoring Initiative. (That includes 115 in the new Lenovo plant.) That’s a decent number, but it pales beside the 6 million factory jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says vanished between 2000 and 2009.
And all those reshoring anecdotes might just be that — isolated anecdotes. In March, Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs pored over the data on U.S. trade and manufacturing and found that the manufacturing gains since 2010 have mainly just been a cyclical bounce-back from the recession and nothing more. "Evidence for a structural renaissance is scant so far,” he wrote.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...cturing-set-for-a-comeback-or-is-it-all-hype/