跨国外包对我国制造业就业的影响效应

本文运用我国1996—2008年28个制造业面板数据检验了参与跨国外包对制造业就业的影响。研究发现,跨国外包促进了我国制造业就业增长,而且服务外包对就业拉动作用大于制造外包。跨国外包对制造业就业规模正面影响存在行业差异,其中对高技术产业影响程度最大,其次是中等技术行业,最后是低技术行业。不论服务外包还是制造外包都不能显著地提升我国制造业的就业结构。实证结果所蕴含的政策启示在于:我国不能仅仅依靠参与跨国外包缓解就业压力,更为重要的是通过加快产业转型与升级以切实提高本土产业对劳动力的吸纳能力。     

论中国发展全球服务业外包的机遇和挑战

服务外包作为国际产业转移的新形式，日益发挥着重要的作用。中国虽然吸收了大量的国际制造业转移，但在服务外包市场上仍处于起步阶段。本文从国际服务外包发展的大环境出发，对制约我国服务外包发展的因素进行了分析，并提出若干对策，以促进我国承接国际服务外包能力的加强。     

Trade liberalization and strategic outsourcing

This paper develops a model of strategic outsourcing. With trade liberalization in the intermediate-product market, a domestic firm may choose to purchase a key intermediate good from a more efficient foreign producer, who also competes with the domestic firm for a final good. This has a strategic effect on competition. Unlike the outsourcing motivated by cost saving, the strategic outsourcing has a collusive effect that could raise the prices of both intermediate and final goods. Trade liberalization in the intermediate-good market has a very different effect compared with trade liberalization in the final-good market.     

Trade liberalization, outsourcing, and the hold-up problem

This paper shows that, in a bilateral relationship where a foreign supplier has to make a relationship-specific investment but cannot enforce a complete contract, the standard hold-up problem of underinvestment is aggravated when trade incurs a tariff. In this context, we identify two new channels through which trade liberalization enhances international trade. First, lower tariffs increase the incentives of foreign suppliers to undertake cost-reducing investments. Second, lower tariffs may prompt vertical multinational integration. These indirect effects imply that responses of trade volumes to trade liberalization are greater than standard trade models suggest and help explain current trends toward foreign outsourcing and intra-firm trade.     

Asset specificity's impact on outsourcing relationship performance: A disaggregated analysis by buyer-supplier asset specificity dimensions

Using hierarchical regression analysis on a sample of UK service firms, this study tests the impact of asset specificity on outsourcing relationship performance within a disaggregated methodological framework that allows to discern the specific effects of various buyers and suppliers' individual dimensions of asset specific investments. The results indicate that the impact of asset specific investments on outsourcing relationship performance varies according to the particular specificity dimension examined. While all statistically significant dimensions of buyers' asset specificity have a negative impact on relationship satisfaction, suppliers' human and dedicated asset specific investments exert a positive and significant influence. The results also show that, in three interaction instances, reciprocal specific investments are positively associated with outsourcing relationship performance. These findings have profound theoretical and methodological implications.     

价值链模块化、国际分工与制造业升级

从20世纪80年代末90年代初开始,在美、日、欧等国的计算机、电子、汽车以及通讯设备等制造业领域先后出现了“价值链模块化”的趋势,这不仅加速了国际制造业分工格局的调整,还有力地带动了一批新兴工业化国家和地区以及发展中国家制造业的快速发展。基于此,本文认为:我国应该抓住世界制造业价值链模块化的机遇,积极参与到国际制造业高端价值环节的分工中来,以提升我国制造业在全球价值链中的位置,推动我国制造业升级。     

Downsizing in US Manufacturing, 1967 to 1997

Using US Census of Manufacturing data covering the period from 1967 to 1997, I analyze factors affecting downsizing in manufacturing. The data show that average establishment size declined in manufacturing, from an average of 60.5 employees in 1967 to 46.5 in 1997. The econometric results indicate considerable support for the hypotheses that foreign competition puts pressure on enterprises to downsize and that falling profits lead to a reduction in establishment size. However, the findings reject the notions that unions are an effective impediment to downsizing and that faster information-technology capital formation leads to downsizing.     

Re-insourcing as a manufacturing-strategic option during a crisis—Cases from the automobile industry

In response to the economic downturn following the recent financial crisis, the automobile industry switched to ‘re-insourcing’. The objective of this paper is to explore underlying motives and decision-making in manufacturing strategy, especially with regard to re-insourcing in the automobile industry. While there has been a lot of research on the topic of ‘outsourcing’, its opposite has not been researched widely. Even though there are some papers on the automobile manufacturing industry, a deeper industrial insight into re-insourcing is missing. Owing to the increased amount of re-insourcing implemented during the economic crisis, the latter lends itself well to gaining a deeper understanding of the phenomenon.     

Nearshoring,reshoring, and insourcing: Moving beyond the total cost of ownership conversation

As firms from across all manufacturing sectors are rethinking their outsourcing and offshoring strategies, there is the potential for a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S. The findings from this case study suggest that the current manufacturing relocation shift is not perceived by manufacturers as a long-term business strategy (as outsourcing has been). As such, the results suggest that manufacturing relocation decisions based exclusively on models such as total cost of ownership (TCO) will not deliver anticipated near-term costs savings. In addition to TCO, firms must have access to information concerning the complexity of the outsourced manufacturer’s manufacturing and supply chain processes in order to fully evaluate the ‘as-is’ outsourced function against ‘to-be’ manufacturing relocation opportunities.     

The performance implications of outsourcing customer support to service providers in emerging versus established economies

Recent discussions in the business press query the contribution of customer-support outsourcing to firm performance. Despite the controversy surrounding its performance implications, customer-support outsourcing is still on the rise, especially to emerging markets. Against this backdrop, we study under which conditions customer-support outsourcing to providers from emerging versus established economies is more versus less successful. Our performance measure is the stock-market reaction around the outsourcing announcement date. While the stock market reacts, on average, more favorably when customer-support is outsourced to providers located in emerging markets as opposed to established economies, approximately 50% of the outsourcing firms in our sample experience negative abnormal returns. We find that the shareholder-value implications of customer-support outsourcing to emerging versus established economies are contingent on the nature of the customer support that is being outsourced and on the nature of the outsourcing firm. Customer-support outsourcing to emerging markets is less beneficial for services that are characterized by personal customer contact and high knowledge embeddedness than for customer-support services that involve impersonal customer contact and are low on knowledge embeddedness. Firms higher in marketing resource intensity and larger firms benefit more from outsourcing customer-support services to emerging markets than firms lower in marketing resource intensity and smaller firms.     

Governance decisions for the offshore outsourcing of new product development in technology intensive markets

This study addresses how buyers organize their offshore outsourcing new product development relationships. Building on transaction cost economics and resource dependence theories, we propose a model of the influence of key new product development offshore outsourcing factors on two important buyers’ governance decisions (i.e., supply concentration and degree of supplier involvement). The antecedents, drawn from the marketing, management, and international business literatures, include: three sources of asset specificity (degree of modularity, strategic value of the project, and technology specificity) and two sources of uncertainty (cultural distance and technological discontinuity). The results, derived from an analysis of 200 offshore outsourcing new product development relationships, provide new insights for academics and practitioners.     

Path dependence, MNCs and the internationalisation process: a relational approach

In the internationalisation literature the notion of path dependence has often been associated with gradualism in the evolution of a subsidiary in its host country. In this paper, we argue that path dependence cannot be exclusively associated with gradualism nor can the evolution of a particular subsidiary be explained solely by its embeddedness in its host environment. Instead, we propose that the internationalisation trajectory of units within a multinational corporation’s network comprises a trajectory in time and space involving multiple, overlapping networks. Gradualism and discontinuities in the evolution of the units of a multinational enterprise are the outcomes of relational mechanisms interacting across different temporal and geographical contexts.     

Why domestic outsourcing is leading America's reemergence in global manufacturing

With cost advantages from manufacturing in Asia and Mexico steadily deteriorating, U.S. firms are reassessing the option of domestic outsourcing to remain globally competitive. The challenge in evaluating international versus domestic outsourcing strategic options lies in that first-movers are extremely and intentionally vague about how they reach their decisions. The purpose of this article is to reveal these reasons by providing statistical and firm-based evidence on five major factors that are influencing the decision regarding where U.S. companies should manufacture to optimize their gross profits. The factors include (1) increasingly competitive U.S. labor costs; (2) increasing productivity of the U.S. workforce; (3) increasingly competitive domestic production costs; (4) incentives from federal, state, and local governments; and (5) improved synchronization of production with other business functions.     

“Your forward is our reverse, your right, our wrong”: rethinking multinational planning processes in light of national culture

Planning processes are potentially important governance mechanisms in multinational enterprises (MNEs). However, the complex multi-level and multi-cultural nature of these organizations may result in compatibility or clashes of culture between the various units of the MNE with respect to planning processes. In this theory building paper we develop a model that outlines how national culture will affect planning processes at both home and host country levels. This framework is applied to show how different planning outcomes may emerge due to these cultural differences. Finally, aspects of language, nontraditional structures, implications and limitations of the model are also discussed.     

Alliances,Acquisitions and Multinational Advantage

This paper reviews recent empirical evidence to assess the implications of alliance formation and increasing merger and acquisition activity of multinationals in the context of the eclectic paradigm. Specifically, the paper will concentrate on the performance implications of international expansion via alliances and mergers, and their relationship to the so-called asset-augmenting foreign direct investment. It has been argued in the literature that the way in which multinationals are able to build on their existing advantages and to add to them by virtue of their international activities confers specific benefits to multinationality. We argue that the growth of cross-border acquisitions and alliances as modalities for international expansion has resulted from the continuing convergence of value-adding capabilities within the Triad, and while such activity can help to augment the asset base of the investing firms, it also has potentially anti-competitive implications.     

日本服务业与制造业FDI状况及其影响因素的实证比较

对外直接投资转向服务业是世界对外直接投资发展的新趋势。目前服务业对外直接投资在规模和增长速度上均超过了制造业。虽然我国目前接受的外商直接投资以制造业为主,但是世界市场对外直接投资的趋势和规律依然值得关注。本文以服务业、制造业对外直接投资的主要代表国家—日本为研究对象,分析了其服务业与制造业对外直接投资在投资规模、区位和产业分布上的异同点。比较其影响因素从而探索服务业在国际投资中独特的规律,并为我国吸引日本直接投资提供建议。     

Temporary social dumping,union legalisation and FDI: a note on the strategic use of standards

This paper analyses the welfare implications for a developing country of using union legalisation as a policy instrument to attract inward foreign direct investment. While its presence may discourage a foreign multinational (MNE) from locating in the host country, unionisation is an important rent-extracting instrument for the host country. We show that if the MNE benefits from dynamic effects, the host country government may have an incentive to adopt temporary social dumping: banning the union in the short run to extract higher rents in the future. However, if the government can use a fiscal instrument in conjunction with union legalisation, the former can circumvent the need to engage in social dumping.     

中国制造业在东亚地区的实力分析

随着中国工业化进程的不断推进,世界各国,特别是东亚国家对中国制造业的崛起极为关注。在此背景下,必须对中国制造业有一个客观评价,既要看到其优势也要看到其不足。为此,本文尝试从出口结构、比较优势、附加值和科技创新能力四个方面对中国制造业在东亚地区的实力进行分析,以便更好地审视中国在东亚地区事务中的地位与应发挥的作用,促进中国制造业向高层次发展。     

现代服务业与制造业竞争力关系研究--以浙江先进制造业基地建设为例

随着制造业结构形式的不断变革,服务作为中间投入要素已越来越多地融入制造业;制造业企业活动的外置又带动了服务业的发展,服务业与制造业进入了一个高度相关、双向互动的阶段.本文以浙江为例,论述了先进制造业基地的建设必须与相关服务支撑产业协同发展,形成整体合力,从而保持竞争优势.     

中国与东盟国家制造业效率比较研究

在全球产业结构经历深度调整的背景下,本文采集2005-2014年中国与东盟国家制造业企业的投入和产出数据,以企业作为决策单元,运用CCR模型测算这些国家制造业的技术效率,结果表明中国与东盟国家的制造业效率均较低,中国制造业效率相对而言低于大部分东盟国家;采用BCC模型进一步对制造业效率进行分解,结果发现纯技术效率低下是导致制造业效率不足的主因.最后,从转变发展方式、加强双方合作等方面提出促进中国与东盟国家制造业效率的相应对策.