After decades of moving production to lower-cost countries, the direction has partly reversed. Governments are subsidising domestic capacity and companies are shortening supply chains.
The factories are real. The jobs are far fewer than the ones that departed.
Why it is happening
Supply chain disruption made concentration risk visible. A company that discovered its entire supply of a critical component came from one facility on the other side of the world made different decisions afterwards.
Policy accelerated it. Subsidies for domestic semiconductor, battery and pharmaceutical production have been substantial and have visibly moved investment.
And the cost gap narrowed. Wages rose in the places production moved to, while shipping costs became less predictable.
Why employment does not follow
A new factory is automated to a degree the old one was not. Production lines that employed thousands employ hundreds, and the roles that remain require different skills – maintaining and programming equipment rather than operating it.
The output can exceed what the old plant produced with a tenth of the workforce.
The skills mismatch
The jobs created are technical and the workforce available in former manufacturing regions is often not trained for them. That gap is the binding constraint on several announced projects.
Training programmes exist and take years, which is longer than a political cycle.
What this means for policy
Reshoring is a resilience argument, not an employment argument, and presenting it as the latter sets up disappointment.
The regions receiving investment get tax base and supply chain activity. They do not get the employment levels of the previous era, and no policy available will produce that.