ABSTRACT
Bigger news, however, and following hot on the trail of the manufacturing sector, is the second wave of outsourcing: that of the service sector. Local information technology (IT) groups such as Wipro, established as major players in the world of IT outsourcing, are jostling for position in the outsourcing market, offering services such as data entry and customer interface operations to clients. In an article in The Economist, Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute, a US think-tank, is quoted as saying that the current wave of outsourcing could be ‘a potent contributor’ to the increasingly protectionist mood in the US. Companies outsourcing are not bound to offer the same conditions that would be the norm in their countries of origin. In the meantime, however, the traditional foundations on which economies are built are shifting like quicksand and some fear a zero-sum game whereby wins in some economies will imply direct and perhaps long-term losses for others.
