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Offshorability and wages in the service sector
Studies by...
By Yuqian Lu and René Morissette
Of all jobs held in the private service sector, about one in four is potentially subject to service offshoring.
Service-sector jobs most susceptible to service offshoring are held by workers employed in business, finance and administrative occupations (e.g., secretaries, clerks and telephone operators) or in natural and applied sciences (e.g., computer programmers, engineers and architects). More than one-half of these workers are in offshorable positions.
Because they generally require face-to-face contact or involve a service that cannot be transmitted by information and communication technologies, jobs in sales and service occupations and those in retail trade, accommodation and food services are the least susceptible to service offshoring. Overall, at most 6% of these jobs are offshorable.
Overall, wages in offshorable service-sector jobs and in other service-sector jobs have grown at a similar pace since the late 1990s. Between 1998 and 2009, real wages in offshorable occupations and other service-producing occupations grew roughly 15%.
In some occupational groups, wages grew at a different pace. Among workers with similar characteristics, wages in offshorable clerical occupations grew 2 percentage points less than those in non-offshorable business, finance and administrative occupations between the periods from 1998 to 2000 and from 2006 to 2009. Meanwhile, wages in offshorable jobs in natural and applied sciences increased 5 percentage points faster than among other natural and applied sciences occupations.
