Offshoring and the skill composition of employment in the Italian manufacturing industries

In this paper, we assess the extent of offshoring in the Italian manufacturing industries, and we study how this phenomenon is affecting the skill composition of employment. Measuring offshoring using the import-use matrices of input-output tables, firstly we estimate the impact of offshoring on the general level of employment, and we don’t find any significant relationship. Then, we examine the relationship between offshoring and employment composition by skills. Our results show that the use of offshoring is not restricted to the search for cheaper unskilled labor, and its impact on the composition of employment seems to be quite different in different industry groups.