Some things cannot reasonably be produced domestically.
Some things are about attempting to shrink labour costs.
It’s cheaper for Britain to send its shellfish to China to be de-shelled by hand, then send it back than it is to pay some folks to do it in the UK (or mechanise the task).
This is an extreme example (and a real one) that highlights what the parent is talking about.
Even when accounting for the human, fuel, cooling and spoilage cost of shipping around the world it’s “cheaper”, but that doesn’t make sense to me because at the end of it there is much less fuel and much less fish than it would have otherwise been.
There’s also not a strong reason to buy shoes made in China except for economic reasons, and more recently supply chain ones.
We can weave fabrics and we have domestic cotton. However, the economics (pushed cheaper by dirt cheap freight) are emphasising a global supply chain where one isn’t needed in most cases.
I’m picking on China a bit but it applies to basically everything where the labour is cheaper and the supply chain bends itself in a more inefficient path (everything else being equal) to capitalise(heh) on the lower labour costs.
