Weblog writer Daniel W. Drezner (danieldrezner.com/blog/) has called attention to some recent remarks by Robert Reich, US Secretary of Labour during President Clinton's first term, which are deserving of the widest possible attention. Reich's article, published at tompaine.com, begins: "America has been losing manufacturing jobs to China, Latin America and the rest of the developing world. Right? Well, not quite."

Of course, manufacturing employment is declining in the US, and at the same time protectionist sentiment against developing countries is rising alarmingly. The importance of Reich's argument is that he clearly demonstrates there is no reasonable or economically coherent relationship between these two phenomena.

To begin with the familiar side of the story, economists at Alliance Capital Management, based in New York, found that between 1995-2002, 11 per cent of US manufacturing jobs disappeared. The situation was still more acute in other developed countries. Japan, for instance, suffered a 16 per cent fall in manufacturing employment over the same period.

Statistical fodder for protectionist populism? Think again. Those developing countries typically blamed for devouring manufacturing jobs in rich countries exhibited the same pattern themselves.

In Brazil manufacturing employment fell by a massive 20 per cent, and the figure for that "Great Satan" of the US protectionist lobby, namely China, was a stiff 15 per cent (from 98 million to 83 million). This last figure is worth meditating upon slowly. It shows that China, far from biting huge bleeding chunks out of the US manufacturing labour force, underwent a steeper contraction in manufacturing employment than the US itself.

To make sense of this data, narrow nationalism has to be abandoned and a global perspective adopted. The trends at stake have little to do with dog-eat-dog "zero-sum" competition between trading rivals, and everything to do with the overall evolution of the world economy. Worldwide manufacturing increased its output over this period (1995-2002) by an impressive 30 per cent. Yet over the same time-span, tens of millions of jobs were shed by the world's manufacturing industries.

Far from lamenting this trend, whether in the US, in China, or internationally, it should be enthusiastically celebrated. Manufacturers are producing more with fewer workers, and such productivity gains are the key to any improvement in general prosperity, which is to say: real economic growth.

As the world economy continues to develop, employment opportunities will be focused in the service sector, which will ultimately expand to encompass the vast majority of workers in all successful societies, with only a diminishing rump of agricultural and manufacturing workers participating in the "primary" and "secondary" sectors. The result will be cheaper food and products, higher standards of living, more challenging and stimulating jobs and ever greater chances for creative participation in productive life.

Responsible governments everywhere will embrace these prospects, channelling their energies into managing the complexities of economic transition. To waste everyone's time with populist hysteria about "job stealing foreigners" is either sheer political cynicism or a futile struggle against the tide.