Country Selection and Impact IT Sourcing: Relationships Between Business Factors and Social Inequality

Abstract

How, if at all, does offshore outsourcing impact social development in supplier countries? We explored the relationship between international offshore outsourcing rankings produced by consulting firms against country level social data obtained from international non-governmental agencies. A multivariate analysis was carried out between commercial outsourcing attractiveness data and country level socio-economic data. Two components from the main country attractiveness index are shown to be correlated with data from three international data sets: child mortality rate, life expectancy and unemployment. This suggests that higher commercial attractiveness scores are associated with lower national performance in socio-economic data, the corollary being that poverty and its consequences make some destinations more financially attractive for investment. Conversely, the top-ranked most successful sourcing destinations tend to have exemplary socio-economic data suggesting that sourcing activity does contribute to humanitarian values.