Offshoring by manufacturing and service firms in the Netherlands : Offshoring behavior in times of a financial crisis

This report includes an overview of the research results regarding the offshore behavior of service and manufacturing firms. The underlying field study is conducted to provide an answer on to the following research question: What is the offshoring behavior of firms operating from The Netherlands? It is a follow up to three research studies focused on the offshoring behavior of service firms conducted by Nyenrode during the period 2003-20081. The earlier studies focused on the service industry because of the perceived shift from the production to the service industry. Towards the end of the last century, services became more tradable2 due to among others advances in information communication technology3. At that time especially, the offshoring behavior of service firms was a challenging research field because academic literature, data and statistics were difficult to capture4. The underlying study aims at providing insights in the status quo and future of offshoring by firms operating from the Netherlands and includes both manufacturing and service firms. In addition,the aim is to determine a trend line in the offshoring behavior of firms operating from the Netherlands by comparing the results of the studies conducted during the period 2003-2010