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Outsourcing as a form of production reorganisation has important implications for factor productivity. Empirical verification of this relationship for India, however, is unavailable in the recent times. To fill this gap, we measure the relationship between outsourcing and multifactor productivity for Indian firms between 2010 and 2014. We use fixed-effect panel data regression and GMM estimates to establish that outsourcing raises productivity significantly at the source. The outsourcing–productivity link has important policy implications for developing countries, such as India. Relative inflexibility of labour market institutions and slow-moving legal procedures may otherwise restrict the restructuring of firms under duress. Outsourcing-related productivity improvements might have helped to overcome such disadvantages even during the global crisis of 2008–2009. JEL: D24, L6

Previous studies have underlined various rationales for production fragmentation from wage differentials, decreased trade costs, access to specialized skills and resources, access to new markets, and benevolent government policies, to technological advancement. However, the idea that a firm’s financing structure can influence its production structure remains less explored, more so empirically. Firms that are financially constrained find it difficult to complete the entire production process in-house and therefore tend to resort to production fragmentation. The current study investigates this link between the extent of credit constraints faced by firms and their outsourcing behavior using data from Indian manufacturing firms over a period of ten years. We also separately study this linkage for firms that tend to export more vis-à-vis firms that export less, to ascertain if increased exporting have relaxed the financial constraint of the firms. The results confirm the positive effect of credit constraints on outsourcing behavior. For a robustness check, subsample regressions and alternative measures of constraints are also analyzed. The study has important policy implications for developing countries such as India, where outsourcing may prove to be a profitable reorganization strategy for firms that are financially constrained.

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