Tradable Services: Understanding the Scope and Impact of Services Offshoring

Abstract

The topic for this editorial is one that until now has been discussed only occasionally in QRE International. However, although the journal has concentrated on publishing papers related to the design, production, and maintenance of physical products, it is perhaps time to also address the quality and reliability of the services offered to consumers today.If we were to make a survey of the type of quality problems that beset the average person in his or her working life, I believe that the 'quality of services' will get a high score. For those who use the PC and the Internet in their daily work, you will surely get complaints about time wasted when Web site addresses are out-of-date or inaccessible. You will hear of time spent on inputting information to Web site registration forms, only to see the information inexplicably erased at the end of the session. You will hear, for example, rail ticket prices on the Internet quoted many times higher than at your local ticket office, contrary to the popular idiom that Internet prices are lower than those offered elsewhere.Other problems relating to the quality of services include the appallingly poor responses often given on telephone help lines, or the frustrations of being talked through any number of options, except the one you need, on an automated telephone service.Mail order services have become commonplace, but all too many companies rely on the customer being available at home to take delivery of a package between nine and five Monday through Friday.The list of everyday examples on poor quality of services is seemingly inexhaustible. The point is that there seems to be a sector, or several sectors of the business world, where the advances in quality and reliability that we have seen in the technical fields have had little or no impact. The beauty of many of the quality tools that we have witnessed being put into use over the past 20 years or so is that they are very flexible. A philosophy such as that of six-sigma, with its statistical underpinnings, can be applied with equal success to the manufacture of automobile generators or office printers, or to the supply and delivery of plastic granulates or electronic components.Some major service corporations have indeed taken six-sigma and other timely techniques on board. It would be interesting to hear of the experiences from these companies.

Manufacturing and Service Sector Roles in the Evolution of Innovation and Productivity

“…Our methodology extends the intuition in Jensen and Kletzer (2006) and Jensen (2011) that a mismatch between supply and demand in a region is an indicator of trade between regions. We formalize this intuition using a simple model that features increasing returns to scale, taste for variety, trade costs and region-level heterogeneity in production costs.…”

“…To make this adjustment, we follow Jensen and Kletzer (2006) to construct region-specific measures of demand for each industry using the BEA's Input-Output Use tables. 14 Precisely, our measure of industry s's demand in region i is defined as:…”

Variable Pay, Industrial Relations and Foreign Ownership: Evidence from Germany

“…8 While this logic applies most immediately to good producing industries, the ability to also offshore services has increased dramatically with the improvement in telecommunications (Jensen and Kletzer 2006). 10 The survey design stratifies by establishment size and oversamples larger establishments.…”

Shared Knowledge and the Coagglomeration of Occupations

“…Empirical studies of agglomeration use a variety of explanatory variables as proxies for these different factors, and examine their impacts on geographic concentration using measures such as the locational Gini coefficient (Krugman, 1991;Audretsch and Feldman, 1996;Jensen and Kletzer, 2006) and the Ellison-Glaeser industry concentration index (Rosenthal and Strange, 2001;Lu and Tao, 2009). More recently, the emphasis has changed from analyzing patterns of agglomeration to 2 coagglomeration in order to shed light on the factors influencing the geographic concentration of industries Overman, 2005, 2008;Ellison, Glaeser, and Kerr, 2010;Kolko;Jofre-Monseny, Marín-López, Viladecans-Marsal, 2011).…”