Brookings Trade Forum 2005 (Brookings Trade Forum)

The media stokes popular images of white-collar jobs disappearing from America's shores, frequently through dramatic, often anecdotal or inconsistent "statistics." This volume of Brookings Trade Forum illuminates questions surrounding offshoring from a variety of complementary angles--from theory to empirics, from industry studies to aggregate labor market effects, and from both developed and developing country vantage points. Existing evidence suggests that relatively few service and white-collar jobs have been offshored to date, but concerns on what might happen in the future persist. Will high-skilled workers in advanced economies such as the United States gain or lose from increased offshoring of services? Are workers in services more or less exposed to global competition than those in manufacturing? What are the complex effects on developing countries? And, what is the policy agenda that emerges from the spread of offshoring into services? The contributors here demonstrate that existing economic theory can go a long way toward capturing, and understanding, key dimensions of the services offshoring phenomenon.