capital-intensive activity

The need for competitiveness in the sector has caused priority to be given to capital-intensive activities, displacing labourintensive activities to countries with lower wage-bills and total social deregulation.

As the comparative advantages (on a global scale) of the "lead goose" causes it to shift further and further away from labor-intensive production to more capital-intensive activities it sheds its low-productivity production to nations further down in the hierarchy in a pattern that then reproduces itself between the countries in the lower tiers.