离岸服务战略重塑跨国公司的竞争优势

由于信息技术的发展,越来越多的服务产品变成可分割的,从而增加了服务的可贸易性。这种变革促使制造业跨国公司将其服务活动离岸经营或进行国际外包,而服务型跨国公司扩张的可能性也大大增加了。离岸服务战略的实施重塑了各类跨国企业的竞争优势,提高了全球化条件下企业的国际竞争力。     

Globalization of R&D and China: An Introduction

In this introduction, we discuss the recent changes in multinational corporations' (MNCs) research and development (R&D) strategies and China's rising role in this new development. Significant changes include: 1) More and more corporations have started overseas R & D operations; 2) the missions of many overseas R&D facilities have shifted from the traditional supplementing and supporting roles to become critical and strategic components of MNCs' global R&D networks; and 3) MNC overseas R&D operations have expanded their geographic reach to carefully selected developing countries. China has benefited from such changes and has become one major attraction for such R&D facilities due to its rich endowment of low-cost and well- trained scientists and engineers as well as its fast growing domestic market and burgeoning foreign investment in manufacturing. The explosion of foreign R&D investment has also been accompanied by the rapid growth of China's domestic investment in R&D. The growth in both domestic and foreign investment in R&D implies that China will improve its position in global economic and technological competition. However, it is unclear to the rest of the world about the implications of China's rising R&D and whether or not China can capture the value from the presence of foreign R&D centres. We conclude that issues related to China's science and technology development in general and foreign R&D in China in particular warrant more research in the future.     

The role of trade and offshoring in the determination of relative wages and child labour

Incorporating family decisions in a two-period model of the world economy, we predict that trade liberalization raises the skill premium and reduces child labour in developing countries where the adult labour force is sufficiently well educated to attract production activities from abroad that will increase the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labour. Elsewhere, liberalization will reduce the skill premium, but it will not necessarily raise child labour. Our prediction is not rejected by the data, and it explains why child labour is negatively associated with trade openness in those developing countries where the labour force was relatively well educated when the liberalization took place, but not elsewhere.     

A simple model of firm heterogeneity, international trade, and wages

This paper presents a general equilibrium trade model in which homogeneous firms choose a technology from a set of competing technologies and choose employees from a set of workers of heterogeneous skill. In equilibrium, the interaction between the characteristics of competing technologies, international trade costs, and the availability of workers of heterogeneous skill gives rise to firm heterogeneity. The model generates several of the stylized facts concerning the (apparent) superiority of firms that engage in international trade relative to those that do not and has implications for the effect of international trade on the skill premium and on observed industry-level productivity.     

关于服务外包理论与实践的几个问题

为推动中国服务外包业的发展,国务院已在"十一五"规划纲要中明确提出要在全国建设若干个服务外包基地,大力发展服务外包业务。对服务外包理论的全面深刻的认识,有利于我们更好地推进服务外包。本文初步探讨了服务外包的内涵、服务外包的发展、服务外包的分类、服务外包的市场和建设几个问题。     

Who Supplied My Cheese? Supply Chain Management in the Global Economy

Today, with an Internet connection and some specialized skills, individuals and companies located in the remotest ends of the earth can compete and collaborate globally. This paradigm shift has occurred as technological forces, the fracturing of political barriers, and a relentless drive for greater efficiencies changed how we work and where we work, ushering in the age of globalization in ways never imagined previously. While many factors can influence macroeconomic variables—including better monetary and fiscal policies, freer trade, and fewer economic shocks—evidence is presented here that better global supply chain management and a more global economy should not be overlooked. On the one hand, these new practices have likely helped to keep inflation lower, reduce economic volatility, strengthen productivity growth, and improve living standards. On the other hand, these new practices cause greater uncertainties and calls for protectionist policies, as outsourcing and offshoring move work to lower cost providers with little regard for geopolitical boundaries. JEL Classification F110, F020     

Exploring the effects of international sourcing on manufacturing versus service firms

As the extent of international sourcing rises and the number of functional activities spreading across-national borders increases, there is a call for a better understanding of its impact on structural change. In this work, we explore the effects of international sourcing comparatively and look for differences between manufacturing and service firms. This study is based on a unique Slovenian data set that links the recently conducted Eurostats survey on international sourcing with a detailed financial firm-level data. The results from the matching methodology suggest that service firms involved in international sourcing gain an improvement in the quality and technological learning, resulting in the employment growth and development. This is not the case for manufacturing firms driven primarily by cost cutting. In our view, a better understanding of these effects is vital for both manufacturing as well as service firms that are influenced by this new trend.     

Efficiency wages,unemployment and international factor movements

This paper examines the implications of unemployment resulting from efficiency wages for international factor movements in a standard Heckscher-Ohlin model where the relative size of the endowments of skilled and unskilled workers and the efficiency wage induced unemployment level in the unskilled labour market are simultaneously determined given the population, supply of capital and its distribution in the economy. Capital in the economy is used only to train individuals for the skilled labour market, where workers are fully employed. It is shown that the optimum labour inflow in the market with domestic distortion and the optimum capital inflow are always positive because they reduce the severity of distortion by raising employment and income for the residents. The income and employment of foreigners also increase. Under this situation the optimum labour or capital outflow on the other hand is always zero. These conclusions directly contradict the result obtained for international factor movements in the presence of exogenously determined unemployment.     

Trade and labour standards: theory and new empirical evidence

Recent trade negotiations, both at the regional and multilateral level, have seen a resurgence of the issue of trade and labour standards. Labour interests in high-standards countries argue that low labour standards are an unfair source of comparative advantage, and that increasing imports from low-standards countries will have an adverse impact on wages and working conditions in high-standards countries, thus leading to a race to the bottom of standards. For low-standards countries, there is the fear that this is just a form of disguised protectionism and that the imposition of high labour standards upon them is equally unfair since it will erode their competitiveness, the latter being largely based on labour costs. Our objective in the present paper is to cast some light on the above debate from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. In particular, we first discuss some possible theoretical links between labour standards and comparative advantage through their effects on the terms of trade. We then investigate empirically the relationship between labour standards, comparative advantage and export performance. Overall, our empirical results suggest that caution should be exercised before drawing broad conclusions on the magnitude and direction of these effects.     

Offshoring in the global economy: microeconomic structure and macroeconomic implications

This article analyses the trade balance effects of Europe agreements (EA) between the EU-15 and four new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC-4) using both static and dynamic panel data approaches. Specifically, the system generalised method of moments (GMM, Blundell, R., and S. Bond. 1998. Initial conditions and moment restrictions in dynamic panel data models. Journal of Econometrics 87, no. 1: 115–43) and recently developed econometric methods such as the Correlated Common Estimation Pooled–Hausman-Taylor (CCEP–HT, Serlenga, L., and Y. Shin. 2007. Gravity models of intra-EU trade: Application of the CCEP-HT estimation in heterogenous panels with unobserved common time-specific factors. Journal of Applied Econometrics 22: 361–81) are applied to analyse the effects of the agreement variable. Our estimation results indicate a positive and significant impact of EA on trade flows. However, there is an asymmetric impact of the agreement variable on the trade balance, exports and imports being affected in different ways, which results in a trade balance deficit in the CEEC-4.     

中国服务贸易国际竞争力研究

本文主要从国际市场占有率、贸易竞争指数、显性比较优势指数、显示性竞争比较优势指数4个方面对中国服务贸易国际竞争力进行分析,探讨了影响中国服务贸易国际竞争力提升的原因并提出了相关对策建议。     

Choosing among diffusion models: Some empirical evidence

Is there a ‘best’ diffusion model? How many and which parameters will adequately represent the long-run diffusion process? Two studies using first purchase data for nineteen durable goods are used to systematically compare twenty-four alternative diffusion models: a meta-analytic study, which pools across categories, and an economic approach, which determines the best fitting model for each category individually. A number of guidelines are produced, which stand to improve the choice of diffusion models in forecasting, theory testing, and normative studies.     

黑龙江省国际化物流园区建设的思考

创新物流服务外包业务可以为黑龙江省对外贸易的发展提供重要的保障和支持.分析黑龙江省物流园区的发展现状、存在的问题,并提出发展对策,具有理论和现实意义.     

Task trade and employment patterns: The offshoring and onshoring of Brazilian firms

The present paper tackles the question whether firms in a middle-wage country offshore production to save labor costs or if they onshore tasks that were offshored from high-wage countries. To distinguish which is the empirically more relevant case, I analyze the effect of importing intermediate inputs on the labor composition using matched employer–employee data and information on trade transactions from the universe of Brazilian firms. Propensity score matching indicates that an intermediate import expansion at the extensive margin leads to employment growth, higher intensities in routine and non-routine manual tasks and an increased share of intermediates exports. These findings thus point out that Brazil's intermediate imports predominantly represent onshored tasks. This result holds regardless of whether intermediate imports from high- or low-wage countries are considered. In line with theoretical considerations, the data show that Brazil's comparative advantage is in medium-complex and routine manual intensive production stages.     

我国服务外包产业发展的竞争优势及存在的问题研究

在经济全球化浪潮中,服务外包产业的不断发展及其国际化,使我国服务外包产业发展具有良好机遇。大力发展服务外包产业不仅是提高我国经济发展水平,优化产业结构及外商投资的发展方向,也是参与国际竞争。本文就我国服务外包产业的现状、优势及存在的问题进行了分析,并结合我国发展服务外包产业的主要思路,以提升产业结构与提高国际竞争力为根本原则,提出我国服务外包产业发展的对策。     

国际产业调整和转移的新趋势——国际外包

20世纪90年代以来,在经济全球化和信息技术创新取得突破性进展的背景下,国际外包市场迅速发展,业务外包成为跨国公司进行产业调整和转移的新方式和新趋势。中国应该利用这个机会,承接国际外包业务,促进中国经济发展。     

Fair wages, unemployment and technological change in a global economy

This paper analyzes the effects of global and national technological change on employment and relative wages in an integrated two-country world (“Europe” and “America”), where both countries are characterized by equilibrium unemployment due to fair wage constraints. The asymmetry between the countries arises from country-specific preferences towards wage inequality, with Europe's preferences being more egalitarian. Furthermore, we look at integration between this two-country world and a third country (“low-wage south”). We derive an analytical tool, the Virtual Integrated Equilibrium, that allows us to adapt Dixit and Norman's Integrated Equilibrium approach to a situation where both countries have endogenous unemployment levels.     

欧盟金融服务离岸外包:现状、特点与趋势

近年来,金融服务外包已成为全球金融业的一大发展趋势,并引起欧盟经济社会的广泛关注．欧盟金融服务业在离岸外包的机遇和挑战中积极参与全球竞争。因此分析欧盟金融服务离岸外包的发展现状和趋势,欧盟银行服务外包的模式、业务范围和动机,讨论银行业务外包所涉及的主要风险以及相关的监管原则和措施,以及研究欧盟金融服务外包市场的特点与发展前景,均对我国发展服务外包承接业务有参考意义。     

The rise of the machines: Capital imports and real manufacturing wages in 57 nations

Outward-oriented policy reform has attracted a large number of academics to the study of the trade-labour market nexus. One of these fields has focused on capital intensive (machinery) imports and its effect on manufacturing wages. The skill-enhancing-trade (SET) hypothesis was put forth to explain a potential relationship where an inflow of capital imports results in increased demand for skilled labour and decreased that of unskilled labour, and thus resulted in a rise in skilled wages and a decrease in their unskilled counterparts. This study revisits this hypothesis with a panel from the manufacturing sector of 57 nations. We improve upon previous studies in a number of ways. We add developed nations to the sample and examine capital imports from rich countries as well as the rest of the world. This takes into account the prominence of vertical production networks in international trade. We adhere closely to the neo-classical trade model and employ definitions of skilled and unskilled workers that capture the production process of particular items. Finally, we fit a robust dynamic panel data model that accounts for the endogeneity of the determinants of trade and wages. In this way we test whether the SET hypothesis is generally applicable as opposed to previous studies which use an ad hoc selection of countries and variables. We find that the SET hypothesis is not driving changes in manufacturing wages. Instead, worker productivity and GDP per capita explain these labour market outcomes.