Examine the geographical consequences of international outsourcing

        The geographical consequences of international outsourcing can clearly be found in India where the software export industry is worth more than 1 billion dollars each year. The number of companies in MEDCs that have outsourced their software by subcontracting has increased rapidly. While there is an increased employment in the emerging host economy, in this example India, there has been a loss of jobs in source economies such as the United States. In the social aspect, this is met with criticism, especially by software engineers in western countries that lose their jobs to overseas workers. In fact, a University of California study concluded that 14 million white collar jobs are vulnerable to being outsourced offshore. At the moment, Corporations in the U.S. and Europe will move an additional 750,000 jobs in IT, finance, and other business services to India and other low-cost geographies by 2016, according to new research from The Hackett Group. What this demonstrates is that outsourcing forces negative impact on the job outlook in the source country as there is more competition with foreign workers.

While at a social-geographic level outsourcing has its pitfalls, infrastructural development has beneficial consequences in host nations. In India, there are cities that have state of the art facilities because of the presence of many overseas companies. In turn, the Indian government has invested more in certain cities such as Pune by providing telecommunications infrastructure. This is necessary for software developers to communicate quickly with parent companies. Pune has become a large industrial city developing rapidly. It is also connected by freeways to other cities around the country which has attracted more investments by hi-tech software companies. In addition to this, there has been a correlation with a real-estate bloom. Rapid development in the area has transformed the landscape of the Kharadi-Kalyani Nagar belt. Land developers have created top-end residential units. The coexistence between shanty huts and modern high rise housing, however, demonstrate that the needs for the local population are not the same for the software developers.

Overall, international outsourcing is attractive for businesses because of the cheaper cost of labor and same output. Information and communication technology is one section of the economy that has become largely outsourced to overseas host countries. This has brought geographical consequences including the loss of jobs at the source country and positive consequences such as infrastructure development in host nations. In the future as population for many developing countries start to increase, the outsourcing of jobs may become more prevalent.