'Outsourcing good for US economy'
RACHEL KONRAD

AP[ TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2004 06:19:07 PM ]

SAN JOSE: Outsourcing white-collar jobs to low-wage countries such as India and China has thrown some Americans out of work, but a new report predicts that the trend will ultimately lower inflation, create jobs and boost productivity in the US.

The Information Technology Association of America, in a survey set for release Tuesday, acknowledges that the migration of tech jobs to low-paid foreigners has eliminated 104,000 American jobs so far, nearly 3 percent of the positions in the US tech industry.

Software engineers have been particularly hard hit. Researchers at Global Insight Inc., which prepared the report for the ITAA, predicted that demand for US software engineers would shrink through 2008.

But ITAA leaders emphasized that outsourcing has damaged the job market far less than the dot-com meltdown of early 2000, when Internet startups, telecom companies and other companies eliminated as many as 268,000 positions.

"The myth is that we've started this long decline into the midnight of the technology workforce," ITAA president Harris Miller said. "This report shows that, assuming the recovery continues, the number of IT jobs will actually increase."