A Portrait of U.S. Factoryless Goods Producers

Fariha Kamal

NBER Working Paper No. 25193
Issued in October 2018
NBER Program(s):Industrial Organization, International Trade and Investment

This paper evaluates the U.S. Census Bureau’s most recent data collection efforts to classify business entities that engage in an extreme form of production fragmentation called “factoryless” goods production. “Factoryless” goods-producing entities outsource physical transformation activities while retaining ownership of the intellectual property and control of sales to customers. Responses to a special inquiry on the incidence of purchases of contract manufacturing services in combination with data on production inputs and outputs, intellectual property, and international trade is used to identify and document characteristics of “factoryless” firms in the U.S. economy.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25193

Forthcoming: A Portrait of US Factoryless Goods Producers, Fariha Kamal. in The Challenges of Globalization in the Measurement of National Accounts, Ahmad, Moulton, Richardson, and van de Ven. 2020