The Evolving External Orientation of Manufacturing: A Profile of Four Countries

Using more than two decades of industry data, the authors profile the external orientation of manufacturing industries in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. They use the term "external orientation" to describe the potential exposure of an industry's revenues and costs to world events through exports, imports, and imported inputs. For each major manufacturing industry, the authors provide histories of the share of total revenues earned in foreign markets, the role of imports in domestic consumption, and the costs of imported inputs in total production. In addition, they construct a measure of net external orientation, which is intended to capture how much an industry's use of imported inputs (a cost factor) can potentially offset exposure to the international economy through exports (a revenue factor).