Person-to-Person Offshoring

It is a basic tenet of offshoring economics: the production of your clothes may shift to Chinese manufacturers, but Chinese workers won’t be able to provide you with a haircut. However, an interesting article from the New York Times makes us realize just how common it is for basic services to be provided to us by actors in geographically remote locations. After the wave of sending business operations abroad, we now witness the offshoring of customer services. Before we had the Polish plumber; we now get another emblematic description of the foreign worker, the “Bangalore butler”. Indeed, workers in India are constantly offering more tutoring and personal assistance services, which, some entrepreneurs argue, will soon expand into the areas of “health and nutrition coaching, personal tax and legal advice, help with hobbies and cooking, learning new languages and skills and more.” However, difficulties are predicted to emerge in this market, in particular due to the absence of economies of scale and the need to overcome a number of cultural barriers. Read the full article here.