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Outsourcing and Offshoring: Home

Catalog Subject Headings

In the catalog, use the following subject headings:

Contract services

Contracting out

Letting of contracts

Offshore outsourcing

Offshoring

Outsourcing

 

Handbooks

The Oxford handbook of offshoring and global employment edited by Ashok Bardhan, Dwight M. Jaffee and Cynthia A. Kroll. 2013.

Guides

Lippincott Library's Business FAQ about outsourcing and offshoring (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)

News and Reports

AFL-CIO: Outsourcing, Trade, and Currency

Links to reports, issue briefs, news, and statements.


Outsourcing: Impacts on the U.S. Workforce (Upjohn Institute)

Organizations

International Association of Outsourcing Professionals
Trade association that publishes an annual Global Outsourcing 100®, companies judged to be the best outsourcing service providers.

Statistics

  • Mass Layoff Statistics: Movement of Work   [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) Program]

Budget cuts mandated in 2013 led to the elimination of the MLS program.

Western multinationals are now increasingly locating their research and development (R and D) activities in the emerging economies of China and India. This offshoring of innovation raises the following questions for policy makers and multinational firms:

1) What is the extent and nature of outsourcing and offshoring innovation, especially to emerging economies like India and China?

2) What are the main drivers of the globalisation of innovation?

Answering these questions involved collecting secondary data on the R and D locations of the world's largest multinationals, namely the Fortune 500 companies (minus financial service firms). The sample covers a wide range of industries, including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, electronics, engineering, and equipment manufacturing.

This is a  cross-national, cross-sectional, micro-level study of companies listed on the Fortune 500 in 2008 (excluding financial services firms) in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, UK and USA.

Library database:

Reports: International

 

Building Supply and Export Capacity: The Case of Offshored Services (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development - 2014) Part of the "Services: New Frontier on Sustainable Development" series, this publication "defines the conceptual framework of outsourcing and offshoring, reviews the origin and evolution, determinants, and trends of outsourcing and offshoring, and identifies key policy challenges for developing countries seeking to maximize development gains from trade and policy action spheres for building supply-side capacity and promoting the export of offshored services."

Offshoring and Employment: Trends and Impacts
OECD publication that provides trends from 1995 through the mid-2000s on offshoring in OECD countries.

The Offshore Services Value Chain : Developing Countries and the Crisis by Gary Gareffi and Karina Fernandez-Stark
The World Bank Development Research Group Trade and Integration Team Policy Research Working Paper (5262- April 2010)

Reports: United States

Congressional Research Service Reports:

Estimating the Impact of Trade and Offshoring on American Workers Using the Current Population Surveys
The World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (5750 - August 2011) that links industry-level data with individual worker data from the Current Population Survey.

Trade, Offshoring, and U.S. Multinational Corporation Employment in the U.S. Manufacturing Sector, 1999–2008 By Samira Salem, Laura Bloodgood, Isaac Wohl, Cathy Jabara and Nathanael Snow, Office of Industries, United States International Trade Commission (USITC) Publication No. ID-034, December, 2012.

U.S. Multinational Services Companies: Effects of Foreign Affiliate Activity on U.S. Employment
Office of Industries Working Paper (No. ID‐29) that "examines the effect that U.S. services firms; establishment abroad has on domestic employment . . . . based on services trade and investment data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and employment data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics".

Lists

Exporting America: The List (CNN, date unknown)
List of companies that CNN has confirmed are "Exporting America." These are U.S. companies either sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor, instead of American workers.

Layoff Tracker (Forbes- discontinued)
The job cuts at U.S. companies: November 01, 2008-March 31, 2010.