Why don't industries seem to think about producing at home instead of going abroad?

Question

Planes and ships do spill out a great deal of CO2, do they not?

Answer 1

I am not sure where "at home" is for you, but Asian manufacturing has some attractive advantages to multinational companies.
Advantages:
Typically no unions to deal with, comparatively low wages, usually in the 3 to 4 yuan range, massive number of people willing to do factory work, lax safety standards

Disadvantages:
They almost NEVER think outside the box to solve a problem, there is a language barrier, turnover of trained worker can be very frequent, risk of patent infringement can be high, not good for "home" job market.

It is in most definitely a two-edged sword.

Answer 2

That is an economics question not an engineering one. The reason is that the overseas worker are cheaper to hire for production then the domestic ones. That means more profit. More profit means that managers get bonuses for making the company's capital rise and the stock prices go up. Nothing else is of interest to industries.

Have you looked at whether the planes and ships spill out more CO2 than the at-home factories and the power plants needed to run them and the at-home steel and copper mining industries needed to get raw materials for parts? Maybe the foreign production is really an improvement in at home CO2.

Answer 3

because they can pay their 5000 chinese employees 3 yuan an hour (less than 50 cents), so shipping doen't matter when you're saving that much on labor.