How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?

Alan Blinder

Working Papers from Princeton University. Economics Department.

Abstract: Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 BLS occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work—either physically or electronically. Using that ranking, I estimate that somewhere between 22% and 29% of all U.S. jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two. (I make no estimate of how many jobs will actually be offshored.) Since my rankings are subjective, two alternatives are presented—one is entirely objective, the other is an independent subjective ranking. It is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation’s "offshorability" and the skill level of its workers (as measured either by educational attainment or wages). However, it appears that, controlling for education, the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004.

Keywords: Offshoring; Outsourcing; Labor; Employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 F16 L24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-03
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http://www.princeton.edu/~blinder/papers/07ceps142.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: How Many US Jobs Might be Offshorable? (2009)
Working Paper: How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable? (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:econom:2007-8

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