The next round of globalization is

The next round of globalization is under way. Who will the big winners be?
The handwriting is on the wall; writes an IT specialist at the Bank of America. Until recently the bank needed talent so badly it had to outbid rivals. But last fall, his entire 15-engineer tearn was told their jobs were redundant. Bank of America has already slashed 3,700 of its 25,000 technical and back-office jobs and more are to follow.
Corporate downsizings are nothing new. These layoffs, thougharen't happening because demand has dried up; one-third of thoses jobs are headed to India, where work that costs $100 an hour in the US gets done for $20. At lnfosys Technologies Ltd. in Bangalore, India, 250 engineers are developing Computer applications for Bank of America. About 1,600km north, at Wipro Spectramind Ltd. 2,500 young college-educated men and women are checking accident reports for an insurance company and providing help-desk support for a big internet service provider — all at a cost up to 60% lower than in the USA.
It's globalization's next phase — and one of the biggest trends reshaping the global economy. The first phase started two decades ago with the transfer of manufacturing jobs to economically developing countries. After that, simple service work, like processing credit card receipts, and digital labor, like writing software code, began fleeing high-cost countries.
Now, all kinds of knowledge work can be done almost anywhere. The driving forces are digitization, the Internet, and high-speed data networks that circle the globe. By mining databases over the Internet, offshore staff can check individual credit records, analyse corporate financial information, and search through oceans of economic statistics.
The impact of offshore hiring is hard to measure, since so far a tiny portion of US white-collar work has jumped overseas. Indeed, a case can be made that the US will see a net gain from this shift. In the 1990s, the USA had to import hundreds of thousands of immigrants to ease engineering shortages. Now, by sending routine service and engineering tasks to nations with a surplus of educated workers, the US labor force and capital can be redeployed to higher-value industries.
Globalization should also keep service prices in check, just as it did when manufacturing went offshore. Companies will be able to reduce overheads and improve efficiency. 'Our comparative advantage may shift to other fields,' says economist Robert Lipsey, 'and if productivity is high, then the US will maintain a high standard of living. By encouraging economic development in nations such as India, meanwhile, US companies will have expanded foreign markets for their goods and services.
Outsourcing experts say the big job migration has only just begun. Frances Karamouzis, research director at Gartner Inc., expects 40% of the USA's top 1.000 companies to have an overseas pilot project under way within two years. The really big offshore push won't be until 2010 or so, she predicts. But if big layoffs result at home, corporations and the US government will face a backlash. Some states are already pushing for legislation to stop public jobs from being transfered overseas and now the unions are moving into the fight to keep jobs at home.
The truth is, the rise of the global knowledge industry is so recent that most economists haven't begun to understand the implications. For developing nations, the big beneficiaries will be those offering the speediest and cheapest telecom links, investor-friendly policies, and ample college graduates. In the West, it's far less clear who will be the big winners and losers. But well soon find out.