ABSTRACT
Today, nearly every significant software firm has globalized some portion of its software production process. The goal of this chapter is to provide insight into this globalization process, that many term ‘offshoring’. Our interest is in how firms use low-wage environments to undertake software work for their global operations. Our interest is not in the relocation of work from companies in a high-cost nation such as Germany or Japan to firms in another high-cost nation such as the USA or the UK even though this type of relocation is common. This chapter also omits work sent to Canada, which does have somewhat lower wage rates than the USA and is the beneficiary of what some have termed nearshoring from the USA. Also excluded from this presentation are the operations of TNCs or domestic firms that service the local economy of a low-wage nation. In most cases, these are relatively small operations except in the case of China, whose domestic consumption of software is increasing rapidly.
