No evidence offshore outsourcing impacts US jobs

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has just issued a report stating that there is no evidence that offshore outsourcing of service jobs to India, China and other low-wage countries has affected the US job market.

The GAO stated that as high-technology jobs have been lost since the technology stock bubble burst in 2000, "the reasons for these declines cannot be specifically linked to offshoring".

This reminds me of a study done about two years ago by the Singapore Ministry of Trade and Industry on whether China had been the cause of the decrease in foreign direct investment to ASEAN. That study concluded "that the Asian Financial Crisis, rather than China, has been primarily responsible for the decrease in...FDI flows".

The problem in such studies is that it is difficult to disentangle the various potential factors and determine exactly which of them are the actual causes of the condition being studied. So failure to find evidence that offshore outsourcing of service jobs affects the US job market does not necessarily mean that it does not, just as failure to find evidence that increase in FDI in China negatively affects FDI in ASEAN does not prove that it does not.