Offshoring and specialisation: are industries moving?

This paper investigates the impact of off-shoring on specialisation via its effect on national endowments and productivity. We use different definition of off-shoring to properly capture international fragmentation of production, while controlling for countries‟ stocks of R&D and ICT capital. Using industry data for the US, Japan and Europe we show that while off-shoring of materials can benefit a wide range of industries, service and intra-industry off-shoring can decrease specialisation in high-tech industry, both within manufacturing and services. This effect can be compensated with increasing R&D investments.