Fear of Service Outsourcing: Is it Justified?

By M. Amiti, Shang-jin Wei. Social Science Research Network, 2004

629 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the facts. The results show that although service outsourcing has been steadily increasing it is still very low, and that in the United States and many other industrial countries "insourcing" is greater than outsourcing. Using the United Kingdom as a case study, we find that job growth at a sectoral level is not negatively related to service outsourcing.

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Citations in the corpus

The Effect of Offshoring on Labor Demand: Evidence from Sweden (2006, unknown): “We carry out two sets of estimations: (1) one where we assume wages to be set economy-wide and (2) one where we allow them to differ across industries.”
The Own-Wage Elasticity of Labor Demand: A Meta-Regression Analysis (2014, unknown): “…and Texeira (2005) short-/long-run, (un)conditional reduced-form, endogenous wage, (no) FE firm-/industry-level, panel/time-series, admin 1977-2001 Amiti and Wei (2005) short-/long-run, (un)conditional reduced-form, exogenous wage, FE industry-level, panel, admin 1995-2001 Arnone et al. (2005)…”
How Does Investing in Cheap Labour Countries Affect Performance at Home? France and Italy (2006, unknown): “The most comprehensive paper looking at the outsourcing of services is Amiti and Wei (2005) based on US and UK data.”
INTRODUCTIONOffshoring administrative and technical work: New fields for understanding the global enterprise (2009, background): “…in the US and Europe to embrace the study of firm and managerial behavior (examples of the former include Abramovsky, Griffith, & Sako, 2004; Amiti & Wei, 2005; Baily & Lawrence, 2005; Bardhan & Kroll, 2003; Blinder, 2007; Groshen, Hobijn, & McConnell, 2005; Jensen & Kletzer, 2006; McKinsey…”
Export Versus FDI and the Communication of Complex Information (2012, background): “The expected ratio of exports to FDI sales in an industry can be expressed as a function of 3See Freund and Weinhold (2002), Amiti and Wei (2005), Jensen and Kletzer (2005), or Hanson and Xiang (2008) for examples of research on international trade in services 6 trade costs, relative productivity,…”
Offshoring and Unemployment: The Role of Search Frictions and Labor Mobility (2009, background): “In this context , Amiti and Wei (2005a) write: On the one hand, every job lost is a job lost.”
Globalisation: the great unbundling(s) (2006, background): “The more recent unbundling of services has been documented by Amiti and Wei (2005); they argue that it is very difficult to measure accurately but that the available statistics suggest that it is still small although growing rapidly.”
Services Trade and Policy (2010, background): “…of outsourcing is broad – including all inputs acquired from unaffiliated companies (Helpman 2006) – the recent outsourcing literature focuses more narrowly on arms-length intermediate service transactions with foreign firms (Amiti and Wei, 2005; Bhagwati, Panagariya, and Srinivasan 2004).”