Delocalizzazione, produzione ed immigrazione

Contrariamente a quanto comunemente ritenuto, la delocalizzazione delle imprese e l’arrivo di immigrazione sono un segno di forza di un distretto industriale.

E’ la teoria sostenuta da Giuseppe Bertola nell’articolo ”Offshoring and immigrant employment: Signs of strength“

Sarebbe da studiare la bibliografia allegata.

Per incominciare collego un articolo di Alan S. Blinder, apparso nel numero di marzo/abrile 2006 di Foreign Affairs con il titolo “Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?” e poi incollo qui il sommario di un paper predisposto da un certo Richard Baldwin, Institute of International Stude di Ginevra, per il governo finlandese che afferma la necessità di una revisione della politica del lavoro e dell’isturzione della CEE, dovuta al fatto che si possono delocalizzare anche i lavori intellettualmente ricchi.

Three eminent economists from Princeton University have recently argued that globalisation has entered a new phase that requires a new paradigmunderstand. This paper examines what is new in the new paradigm and considers the policy implications for Europe. Roughly speaking new-paradigm globalisation differs from the old in that it is occurring at a much finer level of disaggregation. Due to radical reductions in international communication and coordination costs, EU firms can offshore many tasks that were previously
considered non-traded. This means that international competition – which used to be primarily between firms and sectors in different nations – now occurs between individual workers performing similar tasks in different nations. The really new feature is that deeper new-paradigm globalisation will seem quite
unpredictable from the perspective of firms and sectors. Since individual tasks can be offshored, globalisation may help some workers in a given firm while harming others. Moreover, old-globalisation’s correlation between skill groups and winners and losers breaks down. Certain highly skilled tasks may turn out to be offshorable, while other highly skilled tasks are not. Increased offshoring will therefore not systematically help or hurt skilled workers in the EU. In particular, many “Information Society” jobs are prone to offshoring so EU policies aimed at moving workers into Information Society jobs may be wasted since those jobs are only ‘good jobs’ because they do not yet face direct international competition. The paper argues that this has important implications for the EU’s competitiveness strategy, education strategy, welfare states, and industrial policy. The underlying theme is that the increased unpredictability should make EU leaders more cautious about moving workers or skills in a particular direction. Flexibility is, as always, the key to allowing Europe to seize the opportunities of globalisation while minimizing the adjustment costs.