I’m specifically analyzing Canada in this instance. From what I can see Canada has contributed basically nothing at the larger world scale, no meaningful industries except for maybe forestry, but yet their economy was very strong throughout the 80s-2000s.
Now that they are in decline, mass immigration is being pushed to help relieve economic strain on the nation, and slave-like immigration policies where it’s easy to exploit immigrants to work under the table/under minimum wage cash jobs, are very normalized. Did they really ‘deserve’ anything in the first place if 3rd world exploitation wasn’t a variable?
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Canadas economy is strong(9ths largest) due to the fact that they supply oil and gas to a large part of the world. They are experiencing mass immigration not to help relieve economic strain but because the rich would like to not pay their workers a fair wage and would yes like to exploit the immigrants who unfortunately will work for much less then born Canadians. The economy is on the decline due to the fact that there have been major movements away from oil and gas, especially from Canada.
A partial answer to your question would be the word “services” They make up the majority of income for the most developed countries. And if you think that’s not providing anything to the world, well, I should suggest you imagine yourself renouncing the use of hospitals, any kind of public assistance, of GPS, telecommunications, of the internet and all online apps that you use to access content, order your food and buy stuff, all computer software, etc. etc. You can hopefully see how that’s such a huge part of what makes up the world nowadays, that it’s practically obvious that all of that is for the most part more lucrative than simply mechanically producing stuff.
For Canada, if I’m not mistaken they had very big companies in these fields. For example, Nortel comes to mind. They were basically world leaders on telecomm and internet infrastructure employed tens of thousands of prople with highly qualified, highly paid jobs… than they made an extremely bad bad gamble that optical fibers would be the future (it was, just not in the 2000s, they jumped the gun by at least 10/15 years) and poured tons of money into that. When the 2000s internet bubble exploded, they instantly lost all of their expected earnings (and consequently 80% of their valuation), consequently they lost the means to financially face their huge overhangs, government shortsightedly failed to bail them out (usually what you do with such valuable and strategic assets is you make them a public company, resanate them, then sell them back at a gain, it’s been done dozens of times), so they were finally dismembered and sold off to the highest bidders…
Endgame? Those tens of thousands of jobs gone, the jobs supported by the extra expenditures those high paying jobs allowed people gone, in a ripple effect (that’s what people mean when they talk about “trickle-down economy”, it obviously does work at lower income scales, even if after a certain amount of income it can be debated if it works as effectively), the development, startups and investments in innovation supported by those companies gone.
The (mostly american) companies that bought the patents from Nortel and its subsidiaries for cheap then later made billions (underestimate, most likely) when the time was finally ripe for them to penetrate the market.
Huge L for Canada, huge W for USA, we steal your patents, we steal your jobs, and then we sell you back your own products, because you were too dumb to keep hold of them
(All I wrote here is a summary of what I remember from a wonderful 3-part documentary from BobbyBroccoli on it on YouTube, if you’re interested in that story. That channel is liquid gold)
Edit: fixed some orthography mistakes (courtesy of the italian autocorrector), added a couple clarifications