What Global Sourcing Means for U.S. IT Workers and for the U.S. Economy / Catherine Mann

Slashdot discusses about the view put by Catherine Mann, from the Institute for International Economics, who has a put up her viewt What Global Sourcing Means for U.S. IT Workers and for the U.S. Economy at acmqueue.com. Here is the warm up :

Every reader of Communications likely knows someone who has lost his or her U.S.-based IT job since the technology bubble popped four years ago. Most of these job losses came when Y2K projects were completed and investment in IT hardware, software, and services plunged. But others have come as some firms have outsourced the production of IT hardware, software, and services to other U.S. firms and to firms in other countries. What are the gains to the U.S. economy and to its IT workers from global sourcing? What are its costs? And what, if anything, should be the policy response?

It may come as a surprise, but global sourcing in the 1990s, by reducing the price of IT hardware, yielded increased investment in IT and more jobs for U.S. workers with IT skills. Going forward, the global sourcing of software and IT services will further reduce the price of these products, yielding a further increase in jobs demanding IT knowledge and skills. The problem of global sourcing, then and now, is that new IT jobs may not require the same skills or be in the same sectors of the economy.