Manufacturing is a term originated from the two Latin words manus=hand and factus=made.

Thus, it in simple form means made by hand. In the broadest sense, manufacturing can be described as the making of goods and articles by hand, or especially by machinery, often on a large scale and with division of labor. [1] Today, in the United States manufacturing engineering term is being used generally, while in Japan and Europe the term production engineering is preferred.[2] In general, the economic well-being of a country is expressed in terms of its Gross National Product (GNP) per Capita value. GNP is defined as the sum of the value of all goods and services produced in a national economy.[1] Countries with a GNP per capita higher than 12800$ are called high-income (rich) nations whereas the countries with a GNP per capita less than 1400$ are termed as low-income nations.[2] When we analyze the relationship between manufacturing and the GNP per capita value for the countries around the world, we come up with one result; in the countries with high-income the percent contribution of manufacturing to GNP is more than the percent contribution of manufacturing in low-income countries (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. GNP per capita versus manufacturing contribution [2]

We can clearly see from the Figure 1 that while rich nations have approximately 25 % manufacturing contribution to their GNP, the low-income nations have manufacturing contribution of less than 15% to their GNP [2]. In other words, the economic well-being of a country is proportional to the contribution of its manufacturing sector to the GNP per capita

value.[1] Erik Reinert, in his book How Rich Countries Got Rich.. and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, claims that during the last several hundred years achieving a high quality manufacturing sector has been the critical and strategical point for rich nations to improve their wealth and power. According to him, in the rise of England in the 19th century, in the rise of U.S.A., Germany, Japan and the USSR in 20th century, and nowadays in the new developing countries like Korea, China and Taiwan, manufacturing has been the path to prosperity. [3] One of the benefits of manufacturing sector is that when compared to the other elements of economy, it provides more job opportunities. One manufacturing job supports three other jobs in the economy. According to 2005 statistics of the OECD, manufacturing sector of Germany constitutes 23,2% of its whole economy whereas in U.S.A it is 13,4%. If U.S.A had the percentage of Germany, there would be 10 million more jobs in the country.[3] More detailed analyses in manufacturing-economic well-being relationship show us that the core point in this relationship is that for sustained long-term growth, rather than producing the goods it is more important to manufacture the machinery that produces the goods. Building factories and producing more goods is not enough for economic growth, instead one has to produce the means of production. Figure-2 below shows that the most powerful nations in the world, so called The Great Powers produce approximately the 80% of the factory machinery in the world. [3]

Figure-2. General Machinery of Great Powers collectively [4]

REFERENCES [1] SCHEY, JOHN A.; INTRODUCTION TO MANUFACTURING PROCESSES, 1987, ISBN:0-07-100311-8 [2] CREESE, C. ROBERT ; INTRODUCTION TO MANUFACTURING PROCESSES AND MATERIALS, 1999, ISBN:0-8247-9914-3 [3] RYNN, JON; SIX REASONS MANUFACTURING IS CENTRAL TO THE ECONOMY, 2011, THE BLOG OF THE ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE [4] RYNN, JON; STATISTICAL APPENDIX