Globalizing manufacturing engineering education

Global manufacturing activity was surveyed using statistics on worldwide manufacturing employment gathered by the International Labor Office (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland. The survey covered years of 1971, 1981, 1991, and 2000. Accordingly, available data was used to interpolate and extrapolate estimates for the survey years when data for those years was missing. Once estimates of total manufacturing employment were obtained, total population figures were used for the same countries to calculate the estimated percentage of the total population engaged in manufacturing for each of the survey years. Overall, data show that long-range trends in the percentage of the population engaged in manufacturing provide insight into which countries are moving away from a manufacturing economy and which ones are moving toward one.