Traditionally, economy are typically divided into three sectors: Agriculture, industry, and services. Service industry contains everything from nursing to software development and sales. The problem with this division is that there is an extreme productivity gap within work in the service industry. A software developer's work can serve 100 million people at a time, when a nurse can only serve one customer at one specific time.
The reason why highly developed economies have become so service driven is because they have become sort of bimodal: The cost of labor is such that only jobs that are productive enough (profitability per hour) are done in these countries, and jobs that absolutely have to be done there to sustain the population. Jobs in the middle, everything that is not highly profitable or location-dependent, is offshored to lower-cost countries due to the cost of labor. This results in these developed countries having issues: Cost of living is high due to labor cost and there's high economic inequality due to wildly differing productivity.
The solution would be to bring these "mid-productivity" jobs back to developed countries. However, the main roadblocks still remain: The cost of labor is too expensive for most of these jobs to be competitive globally. However, I think there might be a way to do this in the near future: Advancements in robotics would mean a higher level of automation for industrial work, meaning more industrial jobs would become viable in high-cost countries. Each worker would be productive enough that the cost of labor is not critical anymore.
To make this happen, I believe it's important to ensure that the country is viable for this kind of manufacturing: Energy supply needs to be abundant and cheap, workforce needs to be educated, outside the "elite" students, and there needs to be low trade barriers. Low trade barriers are needed, because virtually all manufacturing is part of a global supply chain where parts cross many borders before the product is sold (and (high-value) products are sold globally). Additionally, the viability of automation will vary between different parts of the supply chain, and so you likely cannot automate everything.
The reason why highly developed economies have become so service driven is because they have become sort of bimodal: The cost of labor is such that only jobs that are productive enough (profitability per hour) are done in these countries, and jobs that absolutely have to be done there to sustain the population. Jobs in the middle, everything that is not highly profitable or location-dependent, is offshored to lower-cost countries due to the cost of labor. This results in these developed countries having issues: Cost of living is high due to labor cost and there's high economic inequality due to wildly differing productivity.
The solution would be to bring these "mid-productivity" jobs back to developed countries. However, the main roadblocks still remain: The cost of labor is too expensive for most of these jobs to be competitive globally. However, I think there might be a way to do this in the near future: Advancements in robotics would mean a higher level of automation for industrial work, meaning more industrial jobs would become viable in high-cost countries. Each worker would be productive enough that the cost of labor is not critical anymore.
To make this happen, I believe it's important to ensure that the country is viable for this kind of manufacturing: Energy supply needs to be abundant and cheap, workforce needs to be educated, outside the "elite" students, and there needs to be low trade barriers. Low trade barriers are needed, because virtually all manufacturing is part of a global supply chain where parts cross many borders before the product is sold (and (high-value) products are sold globally). Additionally, the viability of automation will vary between different parts of the supply chain, and so you likely cannot automate everything.