Silicon Valley, Apr. 2004—

The off-shoring psychosis which spread in the US, and the protection stress against the de-location process to the Asia’s markets are too high. A detailed analysis show a surprising reality: there is a reverse de-location process, from which US can only gain. In fact, if it is well-known that there are many American industries who are moving their main plant to China and India, it is less known that enterprises from all around the world (developing countries included) are moving in the USA market. The net balance of these is on the American credit. Among many sectors, US economy has the competitive advantage as high as the enterprises who want to be present at world level cannot think to expand their market position without a US presence, to take the advantage from the American knowledge tank. This process is in force for the same Chinese and Indian enterprise who want to become multinationals, like IT groups who want to be closer to the center of business.

There are two ways to analyze this huge phenomenon about outsourcing/off-shoring. The first is to stop the analysis on papers’ titles on the engagement of thousands of programmers in India by IBM, Microsoft and Intel, or about the General Motor’s investment in China, or, more, on the subcontracting of the call center services and the book-keeping in Asia by banks, insurance companies and airlines. But all of these actions must be compared, on data basis, with other processes of moving in to the US market.

If an American firm do outsourcing in India about its IT assistant service, the value of the job done by its Indian employees is recorded as an export of service from India to US. Vice versa, if a German enterprise ask a legal advice to a legal office from New York, or if a Japanese multinational enterprise ask an advice to an investment bank of Wall Street, these are service’s export from US to Germany or Japan. So, the general value of the export of all legal advice, IT consulting, finance services, engineer projecting, managerial consulting, and so on, in 2003 reached 131 billion of dollars, increasing of 8.4 billion of dollar the same value of 2002. Import, instead, of these services from the rest of the world to the US economy, which includes the outsourcing process about Indian call center and the de-location programmer process, reached 77.4 billion of dollars. US economy closed 2003 with an active balance of 53.6 billions of dollars.

Furthermore, in addition to the purchase of the American services, the other countries’ firms doubled its direct investments in the USA, to build here production and research center, offices and commercial structures. The foreign direct investments on the US soil changed from 39.6 billion of dollar in 2002 to 82 billion of dollar in 2003.

Despite the gap on the labor cost between US economy and Asiatic markets, which is enormously on the Asiatic credit, the USA remain the world biggest exporter of IT services with a net balance of 4.2 billion of dollar in 2002, doubled in comparison with 1995.

Off-shoring move, from here to the other side of the Pacific Ocean, the IT industries’ jobs which are so unskilled as not degree requiring. All the jobs who require an academic qualification, instead, are increasing the IT American employment by 2.3%, from 1999 to 2002, just the years of the New Economy Bill’s deflating and the Hi-Tech markets’ heavy recession.

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