Manufacturing output strongly aligns with national expenditure across countries.
Comparing Gross national expenditure (current LCU) with Manufacturing, value added (constant LCU) across 163 countries, 2011–2025.
- Rank correlation
- +0.96
- Holding size constant
- +0.92
- Countries compared
- 163
- Period
- 2011–2025
What might link these
Manufacturing activity may drive spending via wages and supply chains, while higher expenditure could fund industrial growth. However, reverse causation or shared drivers (e.g., policy quality) could blur the link.
Why this is not proof of anything
This is a correlation across countries, not an experiment. It cannot show that either indicator causes the other, and both may simply follow a third thing. Correlation alone doesn’t prove directionality or rule out unmeasured confounders like institutional strength.
The second figure above repeats the measurement with national population and income held constant. It is the more conservative number: a relationship that largely disappears there was mostly telling you that larger, richer countries have more of most things.
How this was measured
Both indicators were ranked across every country reporting each, and the two rankings compared — ranks rather than raw values, because a handful of very large countries can otherwise manufacture a relationship on their own. The calculation is arithmetic over figures already published on this site; the commentary above is drafted from the two indicator names and the resulting coefficients.