Outsourcing and Offshoring: Implications for Productivity of Business Services
回顾了外包和离岸外包对英国商业服务生产率的影响，分析了就业与生产率同步增长的原因，并指出未来生产率取决于标准化与定制化解决方案的平衡。
This paper reviews the implications of outsourcing and offshoring for the productivity of business services in the UK. Official statistics indicate that business-service productivity has grown by over 20 per cent in the last 7 years at the same time as employment grew by 20 per cent. The paper considers possible factors that account for the simultaneous growth of employment and productivity. First, we discuss outsourcing and offshoring, and their role in enhancing productivity through greater specialization, standardization, and consolidation of business processes, and a shift to higher value-added services. Outsourcing of business services is interpreted as part of corporate restructuring, namely as the unbundling of corporate functions as well as vertical disintegration. Second, as some services become more like products, both low-skilled and high-skilled jobs are subjected to productivity growth through standardization and digitization. It is argued, however, that the future of business-service productivity is on a knife-edge, depending on the mix of two sources of productivity enhancement-namely greater standardization and capturing value from customized solutions.