The manufacturing sector was the largest employer of nonacademic engineers in six of the seven countries compared. The proportions ranged from 31 percent in Canada to nearly half in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In Japan, however, more engineers are employed in the services sector than in manufacturing.

Across all countries, engineers considerably outnumber scientists in manufacturing. (See appendix table 3-21.) By occupation, industrial/mechanical engineers constituted at least half of the S& E manufacturing workforce in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. The proportion of these engineers was also high in France, Germany, and Canada, where they accounted for between 41 and 43 percent of all scientists and engineers employed in manufacturing.

The distribution of the Japanese S& E manufacturing workforce differs from that of the other countries. In Japan, the largest proportion of its S& E manufacturing workforce was civil engineers (32 percent). (For all other countries, except Germany, civil engineers accounted for no more than 5 percent of the manufacturing S& E workforce.) Japan had the smallest proportion of natural scientists (4 percent) employed in manufacturing.

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