Outsourcing Economics

Milberg, William
William Milberg is Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York. He has served as a consultant to the International Labor Organization (ILO), the World Bank, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He is the author (with Robert Heilbroner) of The Making of Economic Society and The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought, and the editor of Labor and the Globalization of Production, as well as the author of numerous articles on the labor market effects of international trade and on the methodology of economics. Professor Milberg received his PhD in economics from Rutgers University.Winkler, Deborah
Deborah Winkler is Research Associate with the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research. She also serves as a consultant to the World Bank's International Trade Department. She is the author of Services Offshoring and Its Impact on the Labor Market. Her recent articles have appeared in World Development, the Journal of Economic Geography, and World Economy, as well as in edited volumes of the World Bank, the ILO-WTO, and the Oxford Handbook Series. Dr Winkler received her PhD in economics from Hohenheim University, Germany.

Outsourcing Economics has a double meaning. First, it is a book about the economics of outsourcing. Second, it examines the way that economists have understood globalization as a pure market phenomenon, and as a result have 'outsourced' the explanation of world economic forces to other disciplines. Markets are embedded in a set of institutions - labor, government, corporate, civil society, and household - that mold the power asymmetries that influence the distribution of the gains from globalization. In this book, William Milberg and Deborah Winkler propose an institutional theory of trade and development starting with the growth of global value chains - international networks of production that have restructured the global economy and its governance over the past twenty-five years. They find that offshoring leads to greater economic insecurity in industrialized countries that lack institutions supporting workers. They also find that offshoring allows firms to reduce domestic investment and focus on finance and short-run stock movements.

This book challenges the idea that development is synonymous with 'upgrading' global value chains through an institutional theory of trade and development.

1. Introduction; 2. The new wave of globalization; 3. What role for comparative advantage?; 4. Lead firm strategy and global value chain structure; 5. Economic insecurity in the new wave of globalization; 6. Financialization and the dynamics of offshoring; 7. Economic development as industrial upgrading in global value chains; 8. Outsourcing economics.