Labor market effects of international outsourcing: How measurement matters

Horgos, Daniel

doi:10.1016/j.iref.2008.10.006

Cited by 43 publications

(42 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…As a result, this measure has been used to assess the potential impact of fragmentation on employment and wages of low-skilled workers of the domestic economy, as they are substituted by workers abroad (see Feenstra (2007) for a review). Horgos (2007) provides a detailed analysis of the design of this type of indices. Generally, these studies find a steady increase of the extent of international outsourcing of material inputs over time.…”

Section: Measuring the International Fragmentation Of Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vertical specialization across the world: A relative measure

Amador¹,

Cabral²

2009

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance

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This paper investigates a specific aspect of international production linkages that, following Hummels et al. (2001), is commonly designated as vertical specialization (VS) -the use of imported inputs to produce goods that are afterwards exported. We propose a relative measure of VS-based trade that combines information from Input-Output matrices and international trade data, producing results for a large sample of individual countries and geographical areas with a detailed product breakdown over the 1967-2005 period. This measure identifies a country's trade flow as associated with VS activities when the share of exports of a good relatively to the world average is above a given threshold and it is accompanied by a relative share of imports of a related intermediate product that is also above the threshold. The quantification of VS-based trade for each country/product pair in each period is made in a relative and conservative manner, since it includes only the value of intermediate imports that surpasses what is implied by the chosen international threshold. The detailed results can be subsequently added up to get any product or geographical breakdown desired. We illustrate this measure by showing the evolution of VS activities at the world level over the last four decades using a product breakdown by technological intensity and a geographical breakdown by main areas. The results point to a substantial increase of VS in high-technology products over the last two decades. There is also empirical evidence on the sharp increase of VS activities in East Asia.

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Section: Measuring the International Fragmentation Of Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vertical specialization across the world: A relative measure

Amador¹,

Cabral²

2009

The North American Journal of Economics and Finance

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“…For a more detailed descriptive overview of the variation of the main variables see Figure 2. 7 As shown in Horgos (2009), the VS-index has quite good properties proxying offshoring activities, especially on more disaggregated industry levels [28]. Another index used frequently is imported inputs over total intermediate purchases (see e.g., Feenstra and Hanson, 1996 [2]).…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

How Offshoring Can Affect the Industries’ Skill Composition

Horgos

Tajoli

2015

Economies

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While most of the offshoring literature focuses on the effects on relative wages, other implications do not receive the necessary attention. This paper investigates the effects on the industries' skill ratio. It summarizes the empirical literature, discusses theoretical findings, and provides empirical evidence for Germany. As results show, effects are mainly driven by the industry where offshoring takes place. If offshoring takes place in high-skill intensive industries, the high-skill labor ratio increases (vice versa if offshoring takes place in low-skill intensive industries). Results are in line with other empirical findings, however, they seem to contradict theoretical causalities. Thus, we additionally discuss possible explanations.

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“…6 There is no general consensus on which is the most appropriate offshoring measure. with q wjt as industry j's total inputs of good w (domestic as well as from abroad) in year t, p as the level of production and f as a ratio estimating the international fraction of the inputs [28,[30][31][32]. The international estimation ratio f relates imported goods m to domestically used goods s. The goodness of the VS-index depends strongly on the international estimation ratio f .…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%