تاثیر برون سپاری فناوری اطلاعات بر بهره وری و خروجی : شواهد جدید از هند

Neither the literature on outsourcing nor the literature on the impact of information technology (IT) have previously quantified the effects of IT outsourcing. This is a particularly important omission in India, which has an IT outsourcing industry that is well placed to bring world-class applications of the technology to domestic customers. This paper provides econometric evidence which shows that there is a strong positive impact of IT outsourcing on output and productivity in India. It also demonstrates that in aggregate, IT outsourcing makes a substantial contribution to economic growth.

There is now a strong consensus that information technology (IT) use has led to increases in productivity and output in the developed world. If use of IT has similar results in developing countries, any process by which successful applications of the technology can be brought to these countries is of considerable interest. A priori it seems possible that outsourcing deals between developing country firms and IT firms with experience in developed countries might provide such a process. So far though, there are only a few empirical publications that quantify the impact of IT use in developing countries and none of these evaluate outsourced IT. This paper is the first to occupy this gap in that it investigates the impact of IT outsourcing on output and productivity in India. India is an interesting and pertinent case study because the country is host to a large, successful, and high profile IT outsourcing industry which has a great deal of experience working with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 client firms in the United States (U.S.) and Europe. This means that if IT outsourcing does indeed offer a means to improve output and productivity, Indian firms, perhaps more than firms in any other developing country, are well placed to take advantage of it. Importantly, a very large amount of data appropriate for investigating the impact of IT outsourcing is also available for India. The analysis described in this paper uses a panel dataset which comprises over 33,500 observations on Indian firms, from both manufacturing and services sectors.

is that the use of outsourced IT makes an important contribution to firms’ productivity and output. The second is that in at least one developing country, the effect on output is sufficiently large to make a significant contribution to economic growth. The third and final role is suggested by the comparison of outsourced IT to in-house IT included above. Both the output elasticity and marginal product of outsourced IT was found to be larger than the same estimate for in-house IT, and in both cases the difference was substantial. A likely explanation for this difference is that IT firms offer advice which allows better returns from IT spending. If this advice is built on knowledge accumulated during previous work in more advanced firms there is a third and very important role for IT outsourcing. That is that it can act as a conduit into developing countries, of knowledge about how to successfully use IT. The work included here contributes in several ways to the literature on the impact of IT. Perhaps the most important of these is that it adds evidence to the small but burgeoning literature which finds that IT is relevant in developing countries and can have a strong positive impact. In particular, this paper adds new evidence which supports the recent finding by Commander, Harrison, and Menezes-Filho (2011) that the impact of IT in Indian firms is substantial. This paper also suggests a methodological improvement to authors interested in the impact of IT. It shows that estimating the impact of in-house IT through the use of firm level econometrics may give misleading results if IT outsourcing is important, but noincluded separately. In future, and particularly in countries with large IT outsourcing markets, it will be important to control for outsourcing whenever the role of IT is investigated. In highlighting the importance of IT outsourcing in developing countries this paper opens a rich vein for new research. An investigation into the role of IT outsourcing in Brazil and China, which both have significant IT outsourcing industries, is an important next step. Another possible route for extending the line of enquiry here is to assess the impact of developing country firms purchasing other types of outsourced goods and services. It may be that know-how on IT is not the only type of expertise that is being spread via the conduit of outsourcing.t