The new rustbelt
The puzzling weakness of manufacturing
IF YOU visit south-western Ontario and the Niagara peninsula you will see scenes of industrial decay. Steel mills, vehicle-parts factories and food processors sit abandoned, their car parks studded with tufts of grass. The region has the look of a rustbelt, and that has Canadians worried.
Manufacturing took a beating in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when high oil prices drove up the value of the Canadian dollar, making factories less competitive. But Canada should now be recovering from that bout of Dutch disease. The “loonie”, as Canadians call their currency, has been dropping along with oil prices. On August 25th it fell to its lowest level in a decade against the American dollar. That, plus the strong economy in the United States, the market for three-quarters of Canada’s exports, should have scraped off much of the rust.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The new rustbelt"
The Americas August 27th 2015
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