N° 2005-09 Juin 2005 Guillaume Daudin* Jean-Luc Gaffard ...

Offshore Relocations and Emerging Countries’ Competition: Measuring the Effect on French Employmentthis ratio as a proxy of the ratio of outsourced industrial employment among total employmentin the business service sector. As total employment in the business service sector was1,521,500 full-time equivalent, we can estimate that 453,000 jobs were outsourced byindustry, excluding energy (508,000 including energy). The same computation can be madefor 1995 and 2002, leading to the following table.Table 6: Estimation of outsourced salary employment from industry into the businessservice sector1980 1995 2002Excluding energy 453,000 600,000 769,000Including energy 508,000 672,000 847,000Source: INSEE national accounts.These numbers suggests that industrial salary employment losses, including energy, areoverestimated by 316,000 jobs over 1980-2002 and 169,000 over 1995-2002 (respectively339,000 and 175,000 including energy). This overestimation represents 22,5% of the total(1,400,000 from 1980 to 2002). This is probably an underestimation of the effect ofoutsourcing, as the rise of temporary employment by itself, simply between 1995 and 2002was 115,000: that suggests that only 78,000 jobs were outsourced beside temporaryemployment. The “true” manufacturing job losses from 1980 to 2000 were probably less than77,5% of the directly measured ones, or less than 1,085,000This is still a sizeable number, but it is certain that not all losses were linked tointernational relocation — or even, more generally, to trade. Technical progress and shifts indemands are other obvious suspects. The next part will present the studies that have tried tocompare the responsibility of these different effects.Part 2: A survey of empirical studies measuring the effects of internationalopenness on French employmentFirst, it must be underlined that it is not possible to measure the effects of internationalrelocation per se. The data available are very recent, and they do not allow to isolate thewhole phenomenon. The European Monitoring Centre on Change (EMCC) — which analysesthe causes of enterprises restructurings in Europe since 2002 — indicates, internationalrelocations account for a small part of (actual or planned) employment losses: 6.3 % for10 See also Mihoubi (2002).16