As Hans-Werner Sinn has shown in Die Basar-Ökonomie, the success of the German export industry is not obviously a success for Germany. Things are going well for the companies but not for Germany, and this is to a great extent the result of the country merely being a place for assembling products that are manufactured abroad. Outsourcing and offshoring have become very prominent since the fall of communism liberated huge, cheap reserves of labour.

Apprehensions are growing that we are faced with a gigantic levelling-off process in which Asia is rising and the West is sinking. The Western world risks losing both jobs and know-how. When the world has become flat it will no longer be a question merely of manufacturing jobs. More and more advanced services have become “tradable”.

How likely is it in the light of this that the earlier strategy of concentrating on investing in education and refining the economy will work? To what extent can the loss of manufacturing jobs be compensated for by an expansion and development in the service sector? Above all: if one chooses to outsource, can one outsource responsibly? And are there alternatives to outsourcing and offshoring for companies? Suzanne Berger and the research team at MIT have shown that there are many different ways of being successful in the global economy, and that it is not at all necessary to follow the outsourcing trend.

In the discussion about the consequences of the search for cheap labour, it may also be worth bearing in mind the significance of technological development. After the technological hype of the IT boom, the techno-visionaries have been lying low, but one cannot rule out major technological breakthroughs altering fundamentally the conditions for labour.

Project start: Autumn 2009.