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The top producers in Europe look to be Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and Ireland. Per capita their output compared to the US is about +38%, -18%, -41%, -43%, ... and +379%??!?!?!
Okay, I was looking up numbers to make a joke about how Germany is carrying the EU, but forget what I was intending to say. What the heck is going on in Ireland? They barely made the European top 5 since they've got such a low population, but they're still outproducing Spain with like a tenth of the population. They're even outdoing Switzerland, which I would have thought would be the world leader in the low-population high-value-manufacture combo. Is this just on paper somehow, some remaining accounting artifact of how they used to be incredibly popular for multinational corporate tax avoidance? I suppose their stats office does say their output is 40% "basic pharmaceuticals", plus around 20% "food products" and 10% "chemicals", but there's still ~20% composed of metal/rubber/plastic/wood/silicon stuff that we might call "stereotypical" manufacturing, and it's not like US output is all steel burnished with blood and sweat either.
It's tax dodging. You want to arrange your EU supply chain and associated transfer pricing so that most of the value added shows up in Ireland and is taxed at Irish rates. So imports of intermediate goods into Ireland are underdeclared and exports of finished goods are overdeclared.
Ireland has the highest ratio of GDP to Actual Individual Consumption of any medium or large country in the world - the Irish people are not seeing this money.
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