Offshore, re-shore, re-offshore: what happened to global manufacturing location between 2007 and 2014?

Abstract

The global manufacturing location is a dynamic result of competing relocation patterns (i.e., offshoring, re-shoring and re-offshoring). This paper proposes a systematic approach to simultaneously measuring the magnitude of those relocation patterns, overcoming the shortcomings of the existing measurements and establishing a data foundation for capturing the process-specific, industry-specific and country-specific features in different relocation patterns. The empirical evidence prior to 2014 confirms that: (i) re-shoring is more likely to be adopted in capital- or technology-intensive manufacturing; (ii) manufacturing production previously offshored to the high-income economies is much more locationally flexible and (iii) re-shoring, especially that in the labour-intensive industries, is more likely to happen with a higher degree of proximity between countries.