A specific-factors view on outsourcing

A distinctive feature of the present wave of economic globalization is that the principle of world-wide arbitrage is increasingly applied to individual components of value-added chains, rather than final goods. The result is a phenomenon called outsourcing, or international fragmentation. Economists have investigated this phenomenon with a focus on welfare and factor-price effects, mainly using Heckscher-Ohlin-type trade models. Existing studies emphasize a positive welfare effect of international fragmentation, but reveal ambiguous effects on factor prices. This paper first reviews the existing literature, identifying the crucial modeling differences that drive the various results. It then presents an alternative view on international fragmentation based on the specific-factors model. The analysis explicitly deals with the cost of international fragmentation, emphasizing that there will typically be a fixed-cost element, with important consequences for the welfare effect of outsourcing. Moreover, the paper highlights a crucial distinction between outsourcing with and without foreign direct investment. With foreign direct investment, outsourcing of a single fragment is sufficient to drive the domestic wage rate to the foreign level, adjusted for the cost of fragmentation. This holds irrespective of the factor-intensity ranking of fragments. If outsourcing takes place without foreign direct investment, then the factor-intensity ranking matters. Domestic labor loses if a labor-intensive fragments moves “offshore”, and vice versa. In both cases, international fragmentation may cause a welfare loss, if the cost of fragmentation includes a fixed element.