Other countries have had similar experiences. For example, while U.S. manufacturing employment has declined 18 percent since 1990, the comparable figure for Japan is nearly 22 percent and for the United Kingdom it is more than 27 percent. Developing countries have experienced a similar pattern.
Even China, supposedly the destination of U.S. manufacturing jobs, has seen manufacturing employment shrink by more than 15 percent since its peak in 1995.13 The long-run trend in manufacturing in the United States and other industrialized countries is similar to what occurred earlier in agriculture. At one time a majority of the U.S. population lived on farms.