Does offshore outsourcing impact home employment? Evidence from service multinationals

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of offshore outsourcing across 5746 European service multinational enterprises (MNEs) on employment at home. We estimate labour demand equations and specifically isolate the global financial crisis (GFC) by undertaking analysis through our longitudinal 19-year panel data, separately for the pre- (1997–2007) and crisis period (2008–2016). We distinguish between offshoring to high and low income countries, as well as between service industry groups. We show that there is some evidence that offshoring by location intensive service firms is associated with employment growth at home during the crisis period, while offshoring in information intensive industries in high income countries is associated with a reduction in employment at home, as firms offshore to be nearer to the client. Overall, our findings suggest that the crisis period has lessened the impact of offshoring service FDI on employment at home.