It is no longer just dirty blue-collar jobs in manufacturing that are being sucked offshor
The standard retort to such arguments is that outsourcing abroad is too small to matter much. So far fewer than lm American service-sector jobs have been lost to off-shoring. Forrester Research forecasts that by 2015 a total of 3.4m jobs in services will have moved abroad, but that is tiny compared with the 30m jobs destroyed and created in America every year. The trouble is that such studies allow only for the sorts of jobs that are already being off-shored, when in reality the proportion of jobs that can be moved will rise as IT advances and education improves in emerging economies.
Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University, believes that most economists are underestimating the disruptive effects of off-shoring, and that in future two to three times as many service jobs will be susceptible to off-shoring as in manufacturing. This would imply that at least 30% of all jobs might be at risk. In practice the number of jobs off-shored to China or India is likely to remain fairly modest. Even so, the mere threat that they could be shifted will depress wages:
Moreover, says Mr. Blinder, education offers no protection. Highly skilled accountants, radiologists or computer programmers now have to compete with electronically delivered competition from abroad, whereas humble taxi drivers, janitors and crane operators remain safe from off-shoring. This may help to explain why the real median wage of American graduates hat fallen by 6% since 2000, a bigger decline than in average wages.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the pay gap between low-paid, low-skilled workers and high-paid, high-skilled workers widened significantly. But since then, according to a study by David Autor, Lawrence Katz and Melissa Kearney, in America, Britain and Germany workers at the bottom as well as at the top have done better than those in the middle-income group. Office cleaning cannot be done by workers in India. It is the easily standardised skilled job? in the middle, such as accounting, that are now being squeezed hardest. A study by Bradford Jensen and Lori Kletzer, at the Institute for International Economics in Washington D.C., confirms that workers in tradable services that are exposed to foreign competition tend to be more skilled than workers in non-tradable services and tradable manufacturing industries.
To offshore services that were once non-tradable results from ______.
A.the blue-collar job market
B.the geographic location of the Underdeveloped worlc1
C.the fierce competition among skilled workers
D.the dive of telecoms fee