Fortune has an interesting article on the competition between the US and China. This, in particular, caught my attention:
China will produce about 3.3 million college graduates this year, India 3.1 million (all of them English-speaking), the U.S. just 1.3 million.Which leads them to conclude that a large percentage of the 76% of US service jobs can be outsourced. This is followed by a citation of a new McKinsey study:
A massive new study from the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that some industries could be changed beyond recognition. In packaged software worldwide, 49% of jobs could in theory be outsourced to low-wage countries; in infotech services, 44%. In other industries the potential job shifts are smaller but still so large they’d create major dislocations: Some 25% of worldwide banking jobs could be sent offshore, 19% of insurance jobs, 13% of pharmaceutical jobs. Looking at occupations rather than industries, some fields will never be the same. McKinsey figures that 52% of engineering jobs are amenable to offshoring, as are 31% of accounting jobs. Adding up all the numbers, McKinsey calculates that some 9.6 million U.S. service jobs could theoretically be sent offshore today.
They imply that even if a small number of this potential moves offshore, its effects will ripple through the economy in the form of lower wages/salaries. Some even expect that US salaries will remain at zero growth for some time to come.
http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov | July 14, 2005 at 08:31 PM