ABSTRACT
Plummeting international telecommunications costs, the rapid growth of high-capacity global telecommunications networks, and the increasing locational freedom of TNCs is fuelling a global decentralisation of routine tele-transacted and tele-defined services at all spatial scales. The ‘off-shoring’ of a wide range of service support services on a global basis is burgeoning. Pelton predicts a rapid growth of what he calls ‘electronic immigration’—the on-line ‘importing’ of (often female) labour and skills from cheap ‘telecolony’ locations around the globe (Pelton, 1992). He writes, ‘the ability to recruit and electronically-import cheap professional services into the United States, Europe and Japan could become the top international trade issue of the 21st century’ (Pelton, 1992). Mark Hepworth, argues, from the point of view of London, that:
transferring ‘back offices’ to cheaper cities is one established option: the superior on-line
control capabilities of computer networks and strengthening ‘internal markets’ in big
companies and government will speed up this exodus. In fact, rather than going to cheap labour
markets like Newcastle and Sheffield, routine office work may be increasingly transferred by
satellite to the Third World (New York’s financial companies are already doing this).
