Jobs recovery and role of offshoring

Overall in the EU, employment has finally recovered to pre-economic crisis levels. The annual report from Eurofound’s European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) Globalisation slowdown? Recent evidence of offshoring and reshoring in Europe describes the nature of this recovery – in particular, indicating the sectors that have gained and lost jobs. It also examines the offshoring of production to countries with lower labour costs and the reverse process of reshoring work to relatively high-wage economies. The report finds that offshoring has accounted for a much lower proportion of job loss (less than 3%) in 2015–2016 than it did in 2003–2007 (7%). The extent of reshoring, the report concludes, is modest and increasing only slowly.