Another way of saying you want your country to be involved in high productivity growth industries, is that you want it to be in industries whose outputs are getting less and less valuable.
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I mean per unit. If there are lots of competing countries, these things should roughly cancel out, making those industries neither better nor worse.
Saying that the cost of purchasing a unit of x drops when the cost of producing a unit of x drops is uninteresting. It just seems to me that you're shoehorning in some confusion (about marginal vs. total value, maybe?) in order to say something that sounds more interesting.
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But there's something else, I think? A country that produces 10,000,000 light bulbs generates more value than a country that produces 10 light bulbs, even if the sale price for each bundle were somehow equivalent. People use light bulbs *to do things they want to do.*
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If light bulbs were in very limited supply & thus extremely costly, you'd likely only see them used by people who had extremely valuable things to do at night. By even a colloquial definition, the marginal value of a light bulb would be much higher... in a much poorer world.
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No. I'm referring to an argument in industrial and trade policy where people argue you want to subsidise your country to go into manufacturing because it has high productivity growth. ...
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They're missing that if you're supplying services you can charge more for them over time due to Baumol cost disease, and import ever cheaper manufactured goods from other countries. Overall, not much reason to prefer one to the other.
End of conversation
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