In The News

Aussies Too Fire Broadside at Outsourcing

Kalinga Seneviratne March 1, 2004
For the last several weeks, US politics have been dominated by discussions about the shift of information-technology (IT) jobs to lower-wage nations. Now, Australians are joining in to register their protest. A new deal between American company IBM and Australian telecom giant Telstra threatens to move 450 Australian jobs to India, where IBM has said it will base the conglomerate's IT...

Outsourcing Debate - Part II

Nayan Chanda February 27, 2004
The outsourcing of white-collar jobs to India and other low-cost countries has become a sensitive issue for US voters. In the second article of a three-part series on outsourcing, YaleGlobal Editor Nayan Chanda makes the case that America's economic fears about outsourcing are driving politics this election year. Chanda observes that "blue-collar workers, long wary of outsourcing, have...

China Clamps Down on Web News Discussion

Mark Magnier February 26, 2004
China has cracked down on the internet once again. This time, the government has targeted news discussion groups, which often feature independent reporting not approved by the government. While it is common for Beijing to quiet dissenting voices before an upcoming National People's Congress (one is scheduled for next week), some see this latest crackdown as particularly heavy-handed. In one...

What Goes Around…

Thomas L. Friedman February 26, 2004
New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman argues that while outsourcing may relocate American jobs to low-cost countries, it also creates jobs by stimulating export demand for American products. "Look around this office," an Indian call center owner remarked to Friedman, "All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-...

Outsourcing Debate - Part I

Rafiq Dossani February 25, 2004
The steady outflow of jobs, especially white-collar ones from the US is emerging as a major issue in the US. In part one of our three-part series on the outsourcing debate two scholars explain the reasons. In recent years, US manufacturing jobs have declined as corporations looked for cheap labor overseas. Still, it was long assumed that service work would provide continued growth for the US and...

Globalisation: The Forgotten Strategy

Pankaj Ghemawat January 21, 2004
Multinational corporations have employed different global corporate strategies in their efforts to adapt to the growing mobility of capital resources. Originally, the approach was to use economies of scale to compete in foreign countries with large domestic markets. Large firms can use their size to average fixed costs over many more products, bringing overall costs down compared to their smaller...

Developing Nations Begin to Embrace Internet Commerce

Bod Tedeschi November 23, 2003
Though the internet has long served the needs of businesses large and small in developed nations, it has struggled to make a broad impact in the developing world, where the internet remains inaccessible to many. Global e-commerce revenue will reach upwards of $4 trillion this year, over 95% of which will come from transactions in industrialized countries. However, as this article reports, a...