How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable
Abstract: Using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 BLS occupational codes, this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy/hard it is to offshore the work— either physically or electronically. Using that ranking, I estimate that somewhere between 22% and 29 % of all U.S. jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two. (I make no estimate of how many jobs will actually be offshored.) Since my rankings are subjective, two alternatives are presented—one is entirely objective, the other is an independent subjective ranking. It is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation’s “offshorability” and the skill level of its workers (as measured either by educational attainment or wages). However, it appears that, controlling for education, the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004. Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to Yanliang Miao for diligent and insightful research assistance, to assistance from the staff at O*NET, and to Princeton’s Center for Economic Policy Studies for financial support. I have also benefited from helpful inputs from David Autor, Alan Krueger, Frank Levy, and Aurora Medina-Ng.To date, more political heat than intellectual light has been shed on the phenomenon that has come to be called “offshoring, ” that is, the migration of employment from the