Determinants and Productivity Effects of Service Offshoring

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Economics - Other, grade: 1,0, University of Hagen (Wirtschaftswissenschaft), language: English, abstract: Economic theory suggests that offshoring creates productivity-enhancing effects but literature in this area has been rather limited for service offshoring until recently. Thus, the contribution at hand tries to provide an overview of why firms engage in service offshoring and examine how service offshoring affects productivity. The work is structured as follows: Section 2 first provides a definition of the related terms and narrows down the topic of the paper. Section 3 briefly discusses service offshoring as a new paradigm of trade in the US. It also addresses the types of offshored service jobs, the offshore locations as well as the current volume of service offshoring. Section 4 discusses the various determinants that facilitate service offshoring. Section 5 contains the core analysis of this paper with the goal of analyzing the productivity effects of service offshoring theoretically and empirically. First, a Heckscher-Ohlin model by Feenstra and Hanson (1996, 1997, 1999) will be introduced as one of the earliest models addressing offshoring and productivity. Then the 'trade in tasks' model by Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) is presented to illustrate how service offshoring affects productivity. On an empirical level, the studies from Amiti and Wei (2009) and Schwörer (2013) will be discussed to address how service offshoring affects productivity specifically in the US and Europe. This will be followed by a comparison of the two empirical studies. Section 6 summarizes the work and adds some final remarks.