Borderless Investor

The New York Times has an interesting piece on outsourcing in its ‘World Business’ section. There’s not much news here for those who have been following either India or general outsourcing trends, but a few important nuggets that drive home where all this is headed:

–IBM’s US workforce fell by 31,000 since 1992 while its Indian headcount rose to 52,000

–India is Citigroup’s fastest-growing international market

–Infosys spends $65 per $1000 of revenue on training. IBM spends less than 7 bucks

–Eli Lilly discovered a new molecule, but hired an Indian firm to shepherd it through the remainder of the development process

–Cisco now has something called a “Chief Globalization Officer”

–Investment banks like Morgan Stanley and Thomas Weisel are hiring Indian analysts to cover American stocks

But far and away the most trenchant observation in the story belongs to Princeton economist Alan Blinder:

The West, he [Blinder] argued, would shed jobs in easily outsourced fields, like accounting, an increase work among jobs like police officers and doctors, which must be done in person.

Fewer analysts and accountants - and more doctors and cops? Amen.