Like Airbus overtaking Boeing, Toyota overtaking Ford, China overtaking all manufacturing and textiles, India overtaking IT outsourcing, etc. Assuming there's a trend here, I don't see how it benefits the US GDP.
The way that international trade increases the real wealth of all nations that participate in it is an economic concept called "comparative advantage." Briefly, it causes the entire world to become a single market in which each locale produces what it can produce most efficiently in relative terms.
Every reputable economist recognizes this. The problem with international trade (in fact, the problem with any sort of economic progress) is that it causes some people's services to become obsolete, and they thus experience reduced pay or unemployment. In principle, the policy solution is to tax the gains that the majority of people experience, and use them to compensate the "losers," particularly by assisting them to relocate and develop other skills.
Another problem politically -- which is evident from the comments on this forum critical of international trade -- is that the "winners" often don't appreciate the way that they are benefitting, because most of the benefits are in the form of
lower prices for the goods they buy. Furthermore, every job lost in a declining industry is essentially replaced in an industry that is expanding due to foreign trade, but the cause of the less productive job lost is obvious while the cause of the more productive job gained is not.
All of this is a reason why I believe that basic economics should be taught in high schools and required in colleges.
Economics is called the "dismal science," largely because of pessimistic predictions by a 19th Century economist named Thomas Malthus that population growth would outrun production, resulting in permanent poverty. Well, the technological advances that have occurred over the past 150 years have appeared to disprove his theory (at least in industrialized countries). But it is extremely naive to believe that technological advances will keep increasing the standard of living indefinitely.
It is especially sobering to realize that much of the increase in productivity was the result of advances in medicine and sanitation (my specialty) that reduced the death rate of younger people who were in their productive years.
Medical advances now are reducing the death rate of older, retired people, thereby adding to the problem of sustaining GDP per capita rather than solving it. As I have said before, the solution to this dilemma is for people to take advantage of their relatively better health and use it to work longer in life, rather than to become completely retired at the "standard" retirement age or (ahem) earlier.
