IB Geography G.2.4 Causes and Consequences of Urban Deindustrialization Notes

Deindustrialization Is Counted in Jobs, and Factory Output Can Rise While Those Jobs Go

1. Deindustrialization is measured on employment in the manufacturing sector, so the quantity that falls is a count of jobs.
2. Manufacturing output is measured separately, as the volume of goods a sector produces, which answers a different question about the same factories.
   1. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics puts manufacturing output growth at 1.2 percent a year from 1990 to 2024, against hours worked falling 0.9 percent a year across the same period.
   2. Labour productivity in that sector rose 2.1 percent a year over those years on the same release.
3. The Bureau's own summary of the period says output growth in manufacturing came mainly, or entirely, from gains in productivity.

United States Manufacturing Employment Peaked in June 1979 and Has Never Returned to That Level

1. Manufacturing employment in the United States reached an all-time peak of 19.6 million in June 1979 on the Bureau's own account of the series.
2. The same series stood at 12,638,000 in August 2026, on the preliminary seasonally adjusted estimate in that month's employment release.
   1. A share of employment answers a third question, with manufacturing holding 22 percent of total nonfarm employment at the 1979 peak and 9 percent by June 2019.
3. The United Kingdom's manufacturing employment has fallen the same way on its own measure, with workforce jobs in manufacturing at 6,732,000 in the 1978 annual figure and 2,482,000 in the first quarter of 2026 on Office for National Statistics figures.
4. Manufacturing employment and output can move in opposite directions over the same decade, so both measures are needed to identify deindustrialization.

Five Forces Cut a City's Factory Payroll, and Contracting Out Support Work Only Moves Where the Jobs Are Counted

1. Rising output per worker
   1. Capital equipment and process change let a plant hold its production with fewer workers, which is the channel that operates even while output grows.

1. Offshoring, or production moved abroad by the firm that owns it
   1. A company that closes a plant in one country and opens its replacement in another moves the employment and the output together.
2. Competition from imported goods
   1. Cheaper or better goods arriving from elsewhere take sales from a domestic producer, which cuts that producer's payroll with no decision by the firm to move anywhere.
3. Household spending moving toward services
   1. Household spending shifts toward services as incomes rise, so employment grows faster in the service sector than in the factories supplying goods.

A Reclassified Job and a Legislated Closing Date Both Read as Fewer Factory Workers

1. Outsourcing, or support work contracted out to other firms
   1. Cleaning, catering, security and site logistics are classified by the activity of the employer, so contracting them out moves those jobs from the manufacturing column into services.
   2. The work carries on in the same building, so this channel moves a statistic while leaving the city's industry where it stood.
2. A closure date set by a public decision
   1. Where an industry runs on subsidy, the year it ends is chosen by a legislature or a ministry, which makes the timing a fact about public finance.

The Ruhr Coalfield Closed on a Date Parliament Fixed Eleven Years in Advance

1. RAG records that when Ruhrkohle AG began operating in 1968, just under 253,000 miners working between the Ruhr and the Lippe, in the Saar and in the Aachen field produced over 111 million tonnes of hard coal.
   1. The same company records around 165,000 jobs lost at Ruhr collieries in the eight years to 1965, before that consolidation, as oil and cheap imported coal took the market.
2. A bill laid before the Bundestag on 4 October 2007 was titled a law to finance the ending of subsidised hard coal mining by the year 2018.
   1. It set out to end subsidised German hard coal production in a socially acceptable way at the close of 2018, with the agreement to be reviewed by the Bundestag in 2012.
3. The last mine, Prosper-Haniel at Bottrop, closed on 21 December 2018, with the final lump of coal raised at its Franz Haniel shaft.
   1. RAG's foundation records the company producing about 2.6 million tonnes and employing around 3,000 people in that final year.

The Buildings Outlast the Industry That Built Them

1. Mining stopped at the Zollverein colliery in Essen in 1986.
2. UNESCO inscribed the Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen on the World Heritage List in 2001.

Detroit's Manufacturing Count Is Metropolitan While the Tax Base Paying for Its Services Is Municipal

1. The Detroit, Warren and Dearborn metropolitan area held 234,500 manufacturing jobs in July 2026 on the Bureau of Labor Statistics count, which is not seasonally adjusted.
2. That total covers a ring of suburbs and separate municipalities alongside the city itself, so it answers a question about the metropolitan area.

The Population Paying the Bills Fell by Two Thirds and the Bills Did Not

1. Detroit counted 1,849,568 residents at the 1950 census and 639,111 at the 2020 census.
   1. The Census Bureau's estimate for 1 July 2025 puts the city at 649,095, so the fall has stopped for the present.
2. Michigan's governor, authorizing the city's bankruptcy filing on 18 July 2013, put Detroit's debt and unfunded liabilities at more than 18 billion dollars.
   1. That same statement recorded 38 cents of every city dollar going to debt repayment, legacy costs and other obligations.
3. Obligations of that kind are fixed in money terms while the population funding them is not, which is the step that turns a lost payroll into a cut service.

The Empty Buildings Move From the Asset Side to the Cost Side

1. The City of Detroit's own account puts the city's blight conservatively at 100,000 vacant lots and more than 40,000 structures that the Detroit Blight Task Force found needed demolition.
   1. A vacant structure still has to be policed, boarded and in the end pulled down, so it becomes a charge on the budget of a city with a smaller payroll behind it.

One Round of Job Losses Can Set Up the Next Through Cumulative Causation

1. Cumulative causation names a sequence in which each round of decline makes the next round more likely.
   1. Wages that were spent in local shops stop being spent there when the plant closes, so those businesses lose turnover.
   2. Households with the most options leave first, so their departure removes the workers a new employer would have recruited.

1. Each arrow in that sequence is a claim that has to hold in the place being described, so the model is a set of steps to test.
   1. The Ruhr lost its coal industry outright while its population held steady, which is one place where the migration step did not run.

Glasgow Records About 30 Percent More Premature Deaths than Its Deprivation Explains

1. A study published in May 2016 by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, NHS Health Scotland, the University of the West of Scotland and University College London examined mortality in Scotland and Glasgow.
2. Its authors define excess mortality as mortality over and above the level that differences in socioeconomic deprivation explain.
   1. On that definition Glasgow shows excess mortality of approximately 30 percent for premature mortality and around 15 percent for deaths at all ages, set against Liverpool, Manchester and Belfast.
3. The report describes those three as similar post-industrial cities, so the gap is measured against places with a comparable industrial history.

The Vulnerability Was Built Up by Decisions Taken Before the Closures

1. The report's explanation is that Glasgow was made more vulnerable over time to the economic and political exposures it then met.
   1. It names Scottish Office regional policy from the later 1950s, including a socially selective New Town programme, among the processes that built that vulnerability.
   2. Moving younger and better qualified households out to new towns leaves the city they left carrying more of the risk when its industries close.

A Lost Wage Reaches a Household Through Its Home as Well as Its Income

1. Half of Detroit's occupied homes are owner-occupied, at an owner-occupancy rate of 50.3 percent in the 2020 to 2024 survey estimates.
   1. A home is the largest asset most households hold, so a fall in local property values takes wealth from owners who never worked in a factory.
2. Skills learned on one production line are worth most to an employer running that same process, so what a worker's experience is worth after a closure depends on whether another plant nearby runs that process.
   1. A plant draws its workforce from the streets around it, so the households carrying the loss are concentrated in the same few districts.

Łódź Lost a Quarter of Its People and Detroit Two Thirds, While the Ruhr Lost Almost None

1. Statistics Poland's Łódź office records the city at 844,946 residents at the end of 1987 and at about 854,000 a year later, its highest recorded level.
   1. The city's area was enlarged by 80.1 square kilometres, or 37.4 percent, on 1 January 1988, so part of that rise arrived with the boundary.
2. The same office puts Łódź at 645,693 residents at the end of 2024.
3. Detroit's loss over a longer period is larger again, at about two thirds of its 1950 census count.
4. The Metropole Ruhr held 5,125,628 residents at the end of 2024, down by 525 people, or 0.01 percent, on the year before.
5. Three places that lost their industries therefore sit at three different points on the population measure, which rules out a single demographic outcome.

Łódź Now Loses More to Natural Change Than to Migration

1. Statistics Poland records natural change in Łódź at minus 7.82 per 1,000 residents in 2024, meaning deaths outnumbered births at that rate.
   1. It records the city's balance of permanent migration in the same year at minus 1,228 people.
   2. That rate applied to 645,693 residents gives a natural loss of about 5,000 people in one year, which is roughly four times the migration loss.
2. Part of that arithmetic is a legacy of earlier out-migration, because people who left in their twenties are not in the city to have children in it.

The Age Structure Left Behind Is Older Than the Country's

1. Statistics Poland puts 29.2 percent of Łódź residents in post-working age at the end of 2024, a category covering women of 60 and over and men of 65 and over.
2. The same measure for Poland as a whole stands at 23.8 percent on the same date.
   1. Łódź has 14.8 percent of its residents in pre-working age against 18.0 percent for Poland, so the city is short of children as well as heavy with pensioners.
3. Ageing of this kind is produced by who leaves, because a city losing people at the ages below its average raises that average while everybody in it ages at one year a year.

Household Size Is the Measure Where the Demographic Change Reaches the Housing Stock

1. Detroit averaged 2.43 persons per household in the 2020 to 2024 survey estimates against 2.53 for the United States.
   1. A city that loses families and keeps single adults needs more dwellings per thousand residents, so its housing demand falls more slowly than its population.

Brazil Ended 2025 with Fewer Industrial Workers than in 2014, and Lost Named Plants in Between

1. IBGE's continuous household survey put 13.3 million people in Brazil's general industry grouping in 2025, which is 73,000 fewer than the same grouping held in 2014.
   1. That grouping covers mining, manufacturing, utilities and waste together, so it is wider than manufacturing on its own.
2. Ford announced on 11 January 2021 that it would cease production at its Camaçari and Taubaté plants in Brazil immediately, with the Troller plant at Horizonte running to the fourth quarter of 2021.
3. A country can therefore lose named plants across years in which its industrial headcount barely moves, which is why the Brazilian argument turns on the measure and the period chosen.

Middle-Income Countries Reach Their Industrial Peak Earlier Than Europe Did

1. In his paper Premature Deindustrialization, Dani Rodrik argues that countries are running out of industrialization opportunities sooner and at much lower levels of income than the early industrializers met.
   1. He puts the peak of industrialization in Britain, Sweden and Italy at income levels of around 14,000 dollars in 1990 prices.
   2. He puts the peak manufacturing employment share of India and many sub-Saharan African countries at income levels of 700 dollars on the same basis.
2. Premature deindustrialization is his term for a country whose manufacturing share turns down before that manufacturing has made the country rich.
   1. A city reaching that turning point at a lower income has less accumulated wealth and public infrastructure behind it than the Ruhr had when its own industry closed.

A Deindustrialization Claim Names a Measure, a Territory, a Period and a Sector

1. Measure says whether the figure counts jobs, people, hours, output or a share, because those five can move in different directions across the same period.
2. Territory says whether the figure covers a city, a metropolitan area, a region or a country, which is where the Detroit and the Ruhr figures part company.
3. Period says which years the change is taken across, since one decade of a long decline can run the other way.
4. Sector says whether manufacturing alone is counted or a wider industrial grouping, which is the difference between Brazil's two readings.

Detroit and Łódź Ended Their Losses at Opposite Ends of the Age Structure

1. Detroit lost about two thirds of its residents between 1950 and 2020 while ending that period with a younger age structure than the United States as a whole.
2. Łódź lost about a quarter of its residents from its 1988 peak while ending that period with an older age structure than Poland as a whole.