This weeks NSSS Award

[bobspud]

Staggering...

[vetran]

Here, there and everywhere | The Economist

Firms are now discovering all the disadvantages of distance. The cost of shipping heavy goods halfway around the world by sea has been rising sharply, and goods spend weeks in transit. They have also found that manufacturing somewhere cheap and far away but keeping research and development at home can have a negative effect on innovation. One answer to this would be to move the R&D too, but that has other drawbacks: the threat of losing valuable intellectual property in far-off places looms ever larger. And a succession of wars and natural disasters in the past decade has highlighted the risk that supply chains a long way from home may become disrupted.

Third, firms are rapidly moving away from the model of manufacturing everything in one low-cost place to supply the rest of the world. China is no longer seen as a cheap manufacturing base but as a huge new market. Increasingly, the main reason for multinationals to move production is to be close to customers in big new markets.