برون سپاری، نهادهای بازار کار و کشش تقاضای نیروی کار

This paper analyses the evolution of the elasticity of labour demand and the possible role of offshoring therein using industry-level data for a large number of OECD countries. The first main finding is that the wage elasticity of labour demand has increased substantially since 1980, although some of this increase may reflect a trend increase in the speed of adjustment rather than an increase in the long-run wage elasticity. The evidence on the potential contribution of offshoring to raising labour demand elasticity is mixed. No association is found between increases in offshoring and demand elasticity during the second half of the 1990s, but there is a significant cross-sectional association between higher average offshoring intensity during this period and higher demand elasticity. We also find some evidence that strict employment protection legislation weakens the cross-sectional association between offshoring and higher labour demand elasticity, suggesting that the relationship between offshoring and the labour demand elasticity may depend on the national institutional environment.

Much previous work on the labour market effects of globalisation has focused on the way trade changes the structure of labour demand across different sectors of the economy and types of workers. In effect, globalisation is represented as a series of incremental demand shocks to which labour markets need to adjust. The overwhelming consensus in the literature is that the total gains accruing to workers from globalisation greatly exceed the losses, although there will be both winners and losers in the absence of compensating government interventions. As concerns short-run adjustment costs, workers displaced by trade represent only a small share of total labour turnover and the labour market adjustment difficulties that they encounter appear to be similar to those experienced by other job losers (Kletzer, 2002 and OECD, 2005). As concerns long-run effects, globalisation appears to have been one of the factors tending to depress the relative wages of low-skilled workers, but to have played a relatively limited role in the overall increase in earnings inequality during the past several decades (Slaughter, 2000 and Feenstra, 2007). By comparison, trade generates large increases in average living standards (Bradford et al., 2005).

In this paper, we analyse the evolution of the wage elasticity of sectoral labour demand since 1980, paying particular attention to the role of offshoring. This analysis makes use of industry data for a wide range of OECD countries. The first main finding is the elasticity of labour demand has increased substantially during the last two decades. This finding is shown to be robust to a wide variety of econometric specifications of labour demand, although we are not able to clearly differentiate between a trend increase in the speed of employment adjustment and an upward trend in the long-run wage elasticity. Both faster and larger adjustments to changes in market conditions are likely to increase adjustment pressures in labour market, although they may also bring important gains in allocative efficiency.