It's interesting that the EU is rated so high, while its members so low. Any manufacturer from for example Poland or Spain can select 'made in eu' label.
Agreed. I generally see "made in the EU" as a warning flag since it makes it seem like for some reason they're too embarrassed to name the actual country the product was made in.
Or you have a company located in a 'good' European country that's trying to hide that they're outsourcing all their manufacturing to a cheap EU country. They hope you'll see German Company + Made in the EU and jump to the conclusion that it's made in Germany.
Really surprised to see the UK so high in the rankings. It might be my French bias talking, but it's a label that doesn't inspire confidence these days.
I'd guess the French rating is mostly due to the high quality food they export. Same as Italy. Outside of Europe, you probably won't see a "made in France" label on anything except for cheese, wine and champagne.
Also fashion. Paris is still considered one of the great fashion centers of the world so any clothes coming out of there gets an extra reputation 'bonus'
Same for Italy. I always thought, like Greece and Poland, it's where EU manufacturers get cheap labor. On the flip side, I thought made in Japan would be top 3. People always look for the label on Japanese line products (zojirushi, fujifilm, etc)
Made in Italy still carries a lot of weight when it comes to cloths, leather goods and other fashion accessories. I guess that explains the positive score. They're also considered a producer and exporter of high quality food.
Labor in Italy isn't cheap at all, because of high pension contributions and labor taxation. Most "cheap" labor intensive productions moved abroad during the last 20 years, what's left is mostly high-quality high-price products, or highly automated ones.
I've found that in the UK, it's common to put made in the UK on there not out of any sense of national pride, but it's just a tradition (which makes sense given it's origins).
I live in the UK, and I'm also surprised to see it so high. The TV series "The IT Crowd" used "made in the UK" as a joke explanation for faulty products, which is closer to how I perceive it.
A lot of HiFi kit is designed and made in the UK from Meridian, KEF, Naim, Linn, Bower & Wilkins, Chord and a bunch of others I’m doubtless forgetting.
All world class stuff and at a range of prices from expensive to eye watering.
Video game design is another interesting one. Believe UK is third in the world for number of game houses after Japan and the US. That’s a very surprising figure to me and one I’d love to know the reason to.
Doubtless many industries like that across our fair isle which are world class in their little niche.
It's important to note that "the import volume of each country is used as a weighting factor". I don't know if they are referring to weighting their participants responses based on their home country, or weighting the results based on the country being ranked, but I feel this could bias the results toward countries that are heavy exporters (like Germany).
You have to weight countries by some factor. Using imports is probably a good idea to have a good representation of buying decisions. If you used population you'd end up with a high share for India even though they import relatively little, making the labels less important.
But given that EU countries generally only import things from other EU countries (due to the tariffs), it could similarly bias towards EU countries that export to most of the EU (like Germany). That's not to say I don't agree with the general placement of countries, I just think it's interesting how many countries on the list are from the EU.
[I'm also a little surprised how well Australia and New Zealand ranked. I didn't realise that we exported enough "Made in Australia" stuff to be listed on something like this.]
Probably they used it to weight the opinions of importers about the exporters, not the other way around, which would't make sense. As such, US opinions would have much much higher weight than German ones.
I'm not sure that China is that respected in the public mind for the iPhone. They came out last in this ranking, meaning not many positive associations, and it's not for nothing that Apple writes "Designed in California" on the back.
The biggest scandal was probably airbags and there, most consumers won't know the company or where it was from. Would've probably been different if it had been consumer goods.
But a lot of consumer products use it, like cars. I would say it definitely cast doubt on customers' overall confidence on whether Made In Japan is worthy of its price
I'd be curious to know why Ireland is so low on the list. Do they produce a lot of cheap products? I would've expected them to be on a level with the UK or France.
It's a measure of reputation not of actual manufacturing quality. Ireland doesn't really have too much of a global reputation, good or bad, when it comes to manufacturing.
Lack of awareness of the polled people would probably be the cause, depending on the methodology, people would probably associate Ireland with Europe or UK.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadIt's interesting that the EU is rated so high, while SOME of its members so low.
Germany leads the chart, UK isn't far behind, Italy and France also.
Also, being 20 in a world with 200+ countries is far from "so low"...
D.O.C. seems to be more common than Fabrique en France. ISTR Citroens having Fabrique en France on their manuals back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_France#/media/File:...
-Fashion / clothes, e.g. suits and fabric in general, shoes.
-Engineering(even if foreign owned), e.g. Rolls Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin.
-Design, e.g. furniture.
-Consumables, e.g. alcoholic drinks such as whisky or gin.
Here's a nice reminder of the kind of thing UK engineering can do (nothing comparable from France recently): http://cars.mclaren.com/ultimate-series/p1
All world class stuff and at a range of prices from expensive to eye watering.
Video game design is another interesting one. Believe UK is third in the world for number of game houses after Japan and the US. That’s a very surprising figure to me and one I’d love to know the reason to.
Doubtless many industries like that across our fair isle which are world class in their little niche.
[I'm also a little surprised how well Australia and New Zealand ranked. I didn't realise that we exported enough "Made in Australia" stuff to be listed on something like this.]
Actually EU countries have MASSIVE imports of Chinese goods, but we also import from lots of other non-EU countries.
EDIT: fixed importers/exporters
From their methodology page. I would argue that there is just as much information in the other end of the scale.
For instance, China is extremely respected, iPhone, and not, low cost electronics, at the same time.
Maybe a country with no positive but also no negative associations would be more desirable than one with split positive and negative ratings.
Would be nice to be able to browse the raw data.
See this article from 1978: http://people.com/archive/made-in-japan-once-was-a-joke-akio...