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Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can.

Manufacturing doesn't just mean building cars and metal-bashing; it includes making pharmaceuticals and hi-tech electronics. A crucial part of the process is the research and development that allows better and greener products to come to market. Britain has traditionally had a strong science and engineering base.

In the developing world, people often use quite basic technology. Many of the most imaginative schemes are using what we'd count as old tech.

Factories not what they used to be - they're all extremely high-tech.

In the industrial revolution Britain led the world in advances that enabled mass production: trade exchanges, transportation, factory technology and new skills needed for the new industrialised world.

Britain, however, has ended up specializing in the ones you don't see as much of: defense aerospace, making drive shafts for cars, pills and drugs, designing chips that go into 94 percent of the world's mobile phones.

It's not going to be true that every country has the same technological possibilities, but there is no reason why it might not be more or less true. Broadly, that the idea that the same technologies should be available everywhere seems to me very plausible.

China is a great manufacturing center, but it's actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial - more advanced industrial centers - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe - and it basically assembles them.

While the technology revolution has yet to reach far into the households of those in developing countries, this is certainly another area where more developed countries can assist those in the less developed world.

Over a long period of time, technological change is something that has been important in reducing manufacturing employment - absolutely and as a share of jobs in the economy.