Off-shoring and Productivity Growth in the Italian Manufacturing Industries

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Off-Shoring and Productivity Growth in the Italian Manufacturing Industries Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe study the relation between the off-shoring of intermediates and services and productivity growth in the Italian manufacturing industries in 1995-2003. Our results indicate that the offshoring of intermediates within the same industry ("narrow off-shoring") is beneficial for productivity growth, while the off-shoring of services is not. We also find that the way in which off-shoring is measured may matter considerably. The positive relation between offshoring of intermediates and productivity growth is there with our direct measures based on input-output data but disappears when either a broad measure or the Feenstra-Hanson offshoring measure employed in other studies are used instead.JEL Code: F16, F23, O4.Keywords: offshoring, productivity, growth, Italy, manufacturing, decline. We are very thankful to Massimiliano Iommi and Antonio Affuso, who shared with us the burden of preparing the data set for this project. Massimiliano is a component of our research team in a broader project on the use of input-output tables to measure the productivity counterpart of off-shoring in European countries. We also thank Giuseppe Bertola, Rosario Crinò, Paolo Epifani and the participants in the CESifo Munich Productivity and Growth Conference for their insightful comments on an earlier draft. Francesco Daveri gratefully acknowledges research funding from the Francesco Daveri Department of Economics

International Outsourcing and Productivity Growth

“…For instance, both Amiti & Wei (2006, 2009 and Crinò (2008) find a significant positive effect on productivity of purchased services from abroad and a somewhat smaller positive effect of imported intermediate materials based on US and European manufacturing data, respectively. In contrast, using industry level data for Italian manufacturing, Daveri & Jona-Lasinio (2008) find a positive impact of outsourcing of materials on productivity, while purchased services from abroad are significantly negatively related to productivity. Furthermore, there are an increasing number of studies investigating the productivity effects of outsourcing at the firm level (see among others Girma & Görg, 2004;Görg et al, 2008).…”

Is labor flexibility a substitute to offshoring? Evidence from Italian manufacturing

“…Thanks to the productivity-enhancing effect of offshoring, even factors of production whose tasks are offshored can benefit from the international delocalization of production (Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg, 2008). The empirical evidence broadly supports this view (Görg et al, 2008;Daveri and Jona-Lasinio, 2008;Hijzen et al, 2010;Jabbour, 2010). However, higher productivity comes at the cost of higher demand elasticities for production workers (Sensen, 2010), increasing job instability (Geishecker, 2008;Lo Turco et al, 2013), broadening wage inequality due to the increase in the relative demand for skilled workers (Feenstra andHanson, 1996,1999;Broccolini et al, 2011), and higher unemployment in presence of imperfect intersectoral labor mobility (Mitra and Ranjan, 2010).…”

Individual Earnings, International Outsourcing and Technological Change: Evidence from Italy

“…Fi- 9 Istituto per lo Sviluppo della Formazione Professionale dei Lavoratori (Institute for Training Workers) 10 For a detailed description of the dataset, see Centra and Rustichelli (2005) 11 This price index is calculated by the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) with respect to blue and white collars households. 12 The dataset is available at http ://www.giuri.unige.it/iotables/index.html.…”