YaleGlobal Online

By Brian Micklethwait | 8 October 2005

If you like this blog, then you will surely also like YaleGlobal Online. It's basically a collection of articles on globalization themes, some culled from other places, but a lot of them written in house.

Two of the pieces are about relatively unfamiliar aspects of the outsourcing story.

The usual outsourcing story these days is about how low-grade IT jobs, like call centre work, are migrating from the USA to India, and about how various people in the USA are getting fractious and anxious about that. Nayan Chanda retells a similar story, but for the USA read France, and for India read Senegal. Very interesting. The problem is that France doesn't have the kind of flexible, adaptable economy that can as easily ride out such unemployment squalls.

Meanwhile, for the Americans, the outsourcing story is moving up to a new level of interestingness, and, for many Americans, scariness. A. Sheshabalaya writes about the rise of India - Bangalore in particular - as an IT centre, to rival and even to surpass Silicon Valley. If American IT people are going to go on having great IT careers, he says, they need to think of Indians as potential partners and potential employers, instead of merely as rivals for lower-level jobs. Indians who have moved to Silicon Valley are moving back to India. Indian IT experts are more and more preferring to stay in India. The days when the officer class of IT was all American, while the Indians were only the poor bloody infantry, are well and truly over.

The tone of voice at YaleGlobal seems to be a lot like it is here. Globalization can and should be win-win, but often, sadly, temporarily, it is win-lose. Globalization is welcomed, but its costs and travails are not denied. Particularly notable from this point of view, is a Guardian article that they have borrowed, about a new railway in China which links the Chinese heartland with Tibet, crossing territory hitherto considered to be an impassable barrier to railway engineers. It's a great achievement which will bring many potential benefits all along its length. But not everyone in Tibet likes it.