The impact of service and goods offshoring on employment: Firm-level evidence

Carmine Ornaghi, Ilke Van Beveren and Stijn Vanormelingen

No 319, Working Paper Research from National Bank of Belgium

Abstract: Advances in communication technology have led to a remarkable increase in the tradability of services, resulting in a substantial increase in offshoring of services over the last two decades. Research investigating how this surge in service offshoring affects employment, has been largely hampered by the paucity of suitable microdata. This paper tries to fill this gap by using a newly constructed database of Belgian firms that combines individual transaction-level data on international trade in goods and services with annual financial accounts. This unusually rich dataset allows us to produce fresh evidence on the impact of goods and service offshoring on total employment and employment by educational levels for both manufacturing industries and the service sectors. Our results show that: (i) goods offshoring has a positive impact on employment growth among workers with both low and high levels of education in the manufacturing industry but this effect disappears when controlling for scale effects; and (ii) service offshoring has a negative impact on employment growth among highly educated workers in the service sectors. This novel evidence suggests that globalization may threaten job security of higher educated workers too.

Keywords: Offshoring; trade in services; labour markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nbb.be/doc/ts/publications/wp/wp319en.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of service and goods offshoring on employment: Firm‐level evidence (2021)
Working Paper: The impact of service and goods offshoring on employment: firm-level evidence (2017)
Working Paper: The impact of service and goods offshoring on employment: Firm-level evidence (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbb:reswpp:201705-319

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Research from National Bank of Belgium Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().