Out of Control

Kerry and Edwards seem anxious to bring outsourcing into the debates. Remember Kerry even forced the o-word into his description of the Bush policy of using foreign fighters to go after bin-Laden.

In tonight’s town hall debate, the issue’s more likely to come up more often. And here’s the latest in a long line of “don’t believe the hype” studies:

In a working paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, two International Monetary Fund (IMF) staffers discover no evidence that job growth in Britain is slower in those sectors with a quicker pace of service outsourcing.

They also find no link between job losses and outsourcing in the United States because outsourcing, by boosting firms' efficiency, creates enough new jobs to offset the initial losses.

From the study’s abstract:

The results show that although service outsourcing has been steadily increasing it is still very low, and that in the United States and many other industrial countries "insourcing" is greater than outsourcing.