Abstract

Analyzing Offshore Outsourcing Locations with GIS
Track: Business GIS
Author(s): Johannes Moenius

This presentation discusses how GIS can support managers in their search for optimal offshore outsourcing locations. Based on recent advances in comparative advantage measures, it shows how the combination of time-series data, maps and map-overlays can help narrow down the potential choice of outsourcing locations. Three new measures were developed that track relative export success by country and industry. They indicate whether this success is driven by a country's relatively lower production costs or relatively lower trade-costs. Both of them jointly determine the geographic reach of this country's exports. This type of analysis can also support politicians in analyzing their countries' strength and weaknesses as well as educators in explaining the usefulness of an otherwise abstract concept. The major strengths of this approach are its ease of use, higher accuracy by explicitly including geographic information, and the ability to identify non-obvious alternative candidate locations.

Johannes Moenius
University of Redlands
School of Business
1200 E. Colton Ave
Redlands , California 92373-3080
United States
Phone: 909-748-8779
E-mail: johannes_moenius@redlands.edu