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The only items I found that were actually produced in the United States and Canada were video games, CD's and DVD's, but these items' production is almost completely mechanized. The average CD/DVD/video game costs only 44¢ to produce, so it would make no sense to waste money shipping them back to the United States when they would cost about the same to produce in the US or Canada! Every other item I found was produced elsewhere. Most of the items I found in Canada and the United States were produced in China, and this part of the report focuses heavily on China, as it is impossible to focus heavily on each country of production. However, nearly all of this information applies for countries close to China, including Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, India and Japan.

The origin of the products from both The United States and Canada was nearly identical, with the preponderance of the items originating from China and Taiwan, and a few items coming from the U.S.A. and Japan. It is incredibly apparent when you look at the data that nearly all production, whether the item is conceptually designed by a domestic or foreign company, was outsourced. The countries that were selling the imported goods contained few domestically manufactured goods. For example, in the U.S., only 5 goods out of 120 were produced domestically. This is since nearly all items sold in the technology sector in the U.S. and Canada are imported. Domestic products simply do not have a large market presence, and even if the companies that develop the products are based in North America, their products are likely to be manufactured elsewhere, for reasons this section of the report will discuss. China produced exactly 84 items on both surveys, and in both surveys the different price range surveys were also similar (see Reference data), but there were some differences here, as is to be expected with a random sampling of products, although these results were also generally the same.

The cost of labour in countries such as China, Taiwan and India is dirt cheap, which naturally attracts many large multinational companies to build large production facilities in those countries. Statistics regarding the average wages for workers in China and it's surrounding countries (who also offer cheap labour) are very difficult to find because reliable statistics for the wages do not exist. However, after a lot of digging I discovered that the average wage in China is about 64¢ per hour, and this is including employer contributions for benefits and social insurance. The highest amount I discovered for hourly wages for manufacturing jobs in China is still a paltry $1.16 per hour. No wonder large companies are attracted to China's labour..

Additionally, China, along with the other more popular countries (for production) I examined for my survey, has weak employment standards, which are rarely enforced. If they were enforced, these labour laws would stop unfortunate, common abuses of chinese workers, including not paying workers, forced overtime and unsafe working conditions.

We can also discover another reason China is a popular country for outsourcing when we examine China's history. We learn that historically, the country was a "beauratic state administration", which was like a communist oligarchy, and the government heavily controlled the economy. There was no free market economy at this point, and people were not given the chance to possess goods. A country that is filled with people with nothing to sell to each other only has one thing to sell to the rest of the world to make money: their labour, and that is what many Chinese are doing now in producing products (as well as farming, another large industry in China).

The United States and Canada are very rich because they have moved away from manufacturing and into more profitable industries like pharmaceuticals, entertainment, defense and education. All countries that have produced wealth usually follow a particular path: they go from agrarian to manufacturing to service to information. For example, India is making the move from manufacturer to service right now, and their manufacturing is being replaced with China. Eventually, China will likely move from a manufacturing to a service economy, and will be replaced with a poorer country and the cycle will continue. This is a reason for China producing a lot of goods: they are in the manufacturing stage of their economic development.

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