Despite what designers may wish, economists now conclude that there is strong evidence to demonstrate that a large manufacturing sector is not a necessary component for a healthy post-industrial economy. Indeed they go further than that and actually present the decline in manufacturing and the growth of the service sector as an indicator that our economy is on the right track. In addition manufacturing plays an increasingly smaller role in economic growth (despite a dramatic turnaround since its recent low in the nineteen eighties) further diminishing the attention it is likely to attract in national policy.