Getting the measure of it

摘要

"There is little hard evidence of the A extent of international outsourcing and offshoring," said a recent report from the OECD, "despite widespread media attention." That attention has tended to portray outsourcing-the contracting of once-core business functions to an outside supplier—and, in particular, its overseas component, offshoring, as a threat either to millions of jobs in Europe and America or to the security of sensitive data handed over to flaky foreigners by western banks. On June 23rd the Sun, a British tabloid, said that it had bought the bank-account details of 1,000 Britons from an intermediary in Delhi who worked for an Indian outsourcing firm. Two days later the story appeared in the Washington Post, headlined "Outsourcing in India in Crisis over Scam".