A/42/427
English
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CHAPTER 8 INDUSTRY: PRODUCING MORE WITH LESS
1. Industry is central to the economies of modern societies and an indispensable motor of growth. It is essential to developing countries, to widen their development base and meet growinq needs. And though industrialized countries are said to be moving into a post-industrial. information-based era, this shift must be powered by a continuing flow of wealth from industry.[1]
2. Many essential human needs can be met only through goods and services provided by industry. The production of food requires increasing amounts of agrochemicals and machinery. Beyond this, the products of industry form the material basis of contemporary standards of living. Thus all nations require and rightly aspire to efficient industrial bases to meet changing needs,
3. Industry extracts materials from the natural resource base and inserts both products and pollution into the human environment. It has the power to enhance or degrade the environment; it invariably does both. (See Chapter 2 for a discussion of the concept of sustainable development within the context of industry and resource use.)
I. INDUSTRIAL GROWTH AND ITS IMPACT
4. As recently as 1950. the world manufactured only one-seventh of the goods it does today, and produced only one-third of the minerals. Industrial production grew most rapidly between 1950 and 1973. with a 7 per cent annual growth manufacturing and a 5 per cent growth in mining. Since then growth rates have slowed. to about 3 per cent yearly between 1973 and 1985 in manufacturinq and virtually zero growth in mining.[2]
5. That earlier, rapid growth in production was reflected in the rising importance of manufacturing in the economies of virtually all countries. By 1982, the relative share of value added to gross domestic product by manufasturing (the
'manufacturing value added', or MVA) ranged from 19 per cent developing countries as a whole to 27 per cent in industrialized market economies and 51 per cent of net material product in centrally planned economies. (See Table 8. 1.) If the extractive industries are taken into account, the share is even higher
- ↑ As will be noted later in this chapter, the conventional classification of economic activities into three sectors primary (agriculture and mining), scondary (manufacturing;, and tertiary (commerce and other services) – has become increasingly ambiguous. Some economic activities cut across all three. Furthermore, the services sector has begun to occupy an important place of its own in industrialized economies. In this chapter. however, the term 'industry' will be used in the traditional sense to include mining and quarrying, manufacturing, construction, electricity, water, and gas.
- ↑ GATT. International Trade 1985-86 (Geneva: 1986).
