The spread of the manufacturing industry is an important part of economic development, creating jobs, new products and trade and investment links between countries. Understanding this process is an important part of understanding how countries develop and how they are affected by current globalization. The economic geography of the world has been changing significantly in the last few decades with old established industrial centres in the developed countries in decline, and new centres emerging in countries that were once thought of as poor and still developing. However, this process has been very uneven with some parts of the developing world'still largely non-industrial.