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• The consensus that manufacturing was the strategic road for development has recently been challenged. • We constructed an original and extensive database on the world manufacturing production, that provides information about value added and employment for 200 countries, of which 160 developing countries, for the 1970–2018 period. • The study does not reveal evidence of a recent decline of manufacturing in developing countries, including or not China. Rather we document a continuous expansion of manufacturing employment in the developing world, that accounts now for 82 % of the world employment, while the share of the developing economies in the world output has doubled over the period. • Since 2010, we observe and we quantify a new pattern. Manufacturing employment does not increase any more in China, while it has continued to grow at the same pace in the rest of the developing world. • Our findings show that manufacturing has continued to play a key role in economic development. Thus, low-income countries should not give up industrialization strategies and should learn from the recent experiences of rapid industrialization and growth. The "rise of the Rest" and almost all successes in economic development have relied on late industrialization. However, the consensus that manufacturing was the strategic road for development has recently been challenged. This paper addresses the issue of the status of manufacturing for economic development in the current period. To clarify whether the importance of manufacturing in developing countries has declined or not in the 21st Century, we constructed an original and extensive database on the world manufacturing production, that provides information about value added and employment for 200 countries, of which 160 Developing countries, for the 1970–2018 period. The study does not reveal evidence of a recent decline of manufacturing in developing countries, including or not China. Rather we document a continuous expansion of manufacturing employment in the developing world, that accounts now for 82 % of the world employment, while the share of the developing economies in the world output has doubled over the period. Since 2010, we observe and we quantify a new pattern. Manufacturing employment does not increase any more in China, while it has continued to grow at the same pace in the rest of the developing world. Our findings show that manufacturing has continued to play a key role in economic development. Thus, low-income countries should not give up industrialization strategies and should learn from the recent experiences of rapid industrialization and growth. In the near future, the upgrading of China's industrial structure will enlarge the windows of opportunities in manufacturing for late-comers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]