The Impact of Offshoring on Employment: A Meta-analysis

Abstract

Over the last decades, the intensification of offshoring movements has generated important impacts on labour markets. The literature on this topic has, however, produced divergent results. We develop a meta-analysis of the empirical literature that estimates the effect of offshoring on employment in the origin country. We find that, although the overall effect is weak, there are important differences in the effects reported by the primary studies that are explained by the development level of the countries included in the sample, the type of goods/services that are analyzed, the structure of the data, the estimation technique, the way offshoring is measured, and the unit of analysis. We also find that on average the effect for highskilled workers is not statistically different from the effect for low-skilled workers.