IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-540-35484-0_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

International Outsourcing in the Netherlands

In: Regional Externalities

Author

Listed:
  • Kees Burger

    (Wageningen University)

  • Rein Haagsma

    (Wageningen University)

Abstract

An important aspect of globalisation is the strong growth of international trade. What is striking is that the trade in final products is more and more dominated by the trade in parts and components. Because of new production techniques, better means of transportation, and the worldwide breakdown of tariff and non-tariff barriers, industrial firms are increasingly able to outsource part of their production process to cheaper producers or locations in foreign countries. Although this internationalisation of the production process is a universal phenomenon, it seems particularly relevant for the Netherlands. This country is not only one of the world’s most open economies, but is also too small to reap all the scale economies of keeping the entire production chain within the domestic borders. It suggests that the presence and consequences of international outsourcing are especially apparent in the Netherlands. Since outsourcing of production (whether it is international or not) decreases average production costs, in a competitive environment, it leads to lower consumer prices and, therefore, increases economic welfare. Nevertheless, the international debate on outsourcing focuses on its possible negative side-effects. It is argued that outsourcing decreases national employment and particularly harms the labour market position of unskilled workers in Western countries. International outsourcing may also reduce industrial production, and thereby undo the positive externalities that result from a vital industrial sector. In this chapter, we try to quantify the amount of internationally outsourced production by the Dutch industry. Since there are several measurement problems, we apply more than one method and use different statistical data bases. Our focus is on the period 1987–2003.

Suggested Citation

  • Kees Burger & Rein Haagsma, 2007. "International Outsourcing in the Netherlands," Springer Books, in: Wim Heijman (ed.), Regional Externalities, chapter 9, pages 173-196, Springer.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-35484-0_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-35484-0_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-35484-0_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.