Measuring “Factoryless” Manufacturing: Evidence from U.S. Surveys

"Factoryless" manufacturers, as defined by the U.S. OMB, perform underlying entrepreneurial components of arranging the factors of production but outsource all of the actual transformation activities to other specialized units. This paper describes efforts to measure "factoryless" manufacturing through analyzing data on contract manufacturing services (CMS). We explore two U.S. firm surveys that report data on CMS activities and discuss challenges with identifying and collecting data on entities that are part of global value chains.