More about jobs going overseas

Asia Times has a great story about jobs going to "cheap" countries. The summary is that not only low level jobs are going to countries like India, but also high level jobs, and some unexpected jobs as health-care, is going there The rich world's disappearing jobs
If the North American Free Trade Act passes, "you will hear a giant sucking sound of jobs going south of the border". - H Ross Perot, 1992

In the developed world and particularly in the United States, the scope of jobs disappearing overseas is widening beyond all imagining, to professions that almost nobody expected to be hit, and with far higher incomes than anybody thought possible as globalization bonds with the law of unintended consequences.

As instant communication becomes more ubiquitous, the developed world's white-collar professions, from CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing) to accounting to medicine to architecture to aircraft design to research and development to engineering to equity research and financial management to knowledge management to revenue-cycle management - a whole panorama of high-income employment - are inexorably going.

The impact on American and European society is inevitably going to be far more profound than almost anyone understands today. It is already responsible for major positive changes in the living standards of the middle class in other parts of the world.

The United States currently accounts for as much as 70 percent of the world's "outsourcing", as it is called, or sometimes offshoring. McKinsey & Co, the international consulting firm, projects that the flight of jobs offshore to developing countries will grow by 30-40 percent a year over the next five years. By the highest estimates, as many as a million jobs have disappeared overseas from the US job market since the current economic slowdown began in 2000 and could represent a major reason for the struggle the US economy is undergoing to right itself.

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India is emerging as the health-care destination of choice for an increasing number of surgery candidates, with more than 60,000 foreign patients from 34 countries treated in its top-flight Apollo Hospitals chain in the past decade. A delegation of Indian doctors was recently invited to London to brief British Prime Minister Tony Blair's medical advisers on flying surgery patients from the United Kingdom to Mumbai and or New Delhi for operative and post-operative care, allowing them to recuperate, and flying them back to the UK far cheaper than treating them at home.

Fifteen global car makers, including General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Audi, Isuzu and Nissan, have set up design offices in India with a combined budget of $1.5 billion to outsource auto design. Industry estimates are that the cost of auto design in Europe's exclusive Pininfarina and Bertone design houses run as high as $800 an hour, while low-cost designers in Bangalore can do lower-level design for $60 an hour.

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In a stunningly prophetic article, Frances Cairncross, a senior editor at The Economist, wrote in 1993 that the communications revolution had wrought what she called "the death of distance". In that article, she posited that there had been three profound transport revolutions since the 19th century, the first when the arrival of steam initiated a steep fall in the cost of moving goods. The second came in the 20th century, when the cost of transporting people fell to the point where vast migrations across borders brought tens of millions of immigrants from old Europe to the Americas, and since has resulted in massive movements of economic refugees from the poor countries to the rich ones.

The third revolution, Cairncross wrote, would dominate the first half of the current century. It is the diminishing cost of transporting information. Her vision has come true even faster than she thought. Because of fiber-optic cable, satellites and digital compression, the transport of information can be basically free. The enormous charges for personal calls on telephone lines across the Atlantic or the Pacific are virtually all gravy. Once the satellite or the cable is in place and the capital expenses are paid, there is no expense. Companies with their own transponders on satellites have lowered their costs dramatically.