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This paper develops two models to study the impact of trade in intermediate goods on wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labor in a developed country and a developing country. The first model assumes symmetric production technologies in the intermediate good. It predicts that trade in the intermediate good will increase wage inequality in the developed country, but decrease wage inequality in the developing country. The second model assumes asymmetric technologies in the intermediate good. It predicts that trade in the intermediate good can lead to an increase in wage inequality in both the developed country and the developing country.

Globalization has its detractors as well as supporters. Concerns have been expressed about the greater ease of fragmenting the production process so that more parts can be outsourced to a variety of countries. Highly developed regions worry about the possibility of greater unemployment or lower unskilled wage rates. Less developed regions are concerned that they may not possess a comparative advantage in the service link activities that promote fragmentation. The paper discusses these issues, with special emphasis on India and China.

This paper is a non-technical survey of the literature on offshoring and outsourcing, with special focus on the relevance of this literature for Asia. We first see how and to what extent this new literature helps us understand firms' tradeoffs between outsourcing and integration, the variation in the mixes of organizational forms and the location of outsourced activities. We also explore what plausibly triggers offshoring and thereafter what determines its dynamics. Finally, we draw inferences from the existing theory and empirical work about the developmental impact of offshoring on Asia, with special attention to issues related to inequality and poverty.

This paper examines India's role in services outsourcing within Asia. It provides a brief overview of the global as well as Indian services outsourcing industry. The core section examines India's relationship with other Asian countries such as China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia in service outsourcing. It examines the extent to which these countries pose a competitive challenge to India and concludes that at this time, India is far ahead although it is likely to face growing competition as its costs rise. The paper highlights the need to move beyond this comparative paradigm and to examine the complementary and collaborative opportunities that exist between India and other Asian countries in services outsourcing. It concludes that there is considerable scope for such synergies and that India and other Asian countries can form different parts of a larger regional or global delivery model. Regional and bilateral agreements within Asia can also facilitate this process.

We consider m-machine permutation flow shop problems with an outsourcing option for a special case where each job's processing time equals the job's processing requirement plus a characteristic value of the machine. The objective is to minimize the sum of the performance measure for in-house jobs (the total completion time or the makespan) and the total outsourcing cost. We prove that two problems are polynomially solvable when the number of machines is fixed.

This paper addresses a scheduling problem in a flexible supply chain where the jobs can be either processed in house, or outsourced to a third-party supplier with the goal of minimizing the sum of holding and delivery costs subject to an upper bound on the outsourcing cost. The problem with identical job processing times has been proved as binary ${𝒩}{𝒫}$-hard one and a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) that runs in $O(\frac{n^8}{{\epsilon }^2})$ time has also been given. The aim of this paper is to derive a more effective FPTAS running in $O(\frac{n^{4}lognlogmax\{n,1/\epsilon \}}{{\epsilon }^2})$ time for this problem.

In this paper, we address a supply chain scheduling model with outsourcing and transportation. A job can be scheduled either on a single machine at a manufacturer’s plant or outsourced to a subcontractor. We assume that there are a sufficient number of vehicles at the manufacturer and the subcontractor such that each completed job can be transported to its customer immediately. For a given set of jobs, the decisions we need to make include the selection of jobs to be outsourced and the schedule of all the jobs. When the objective functions are to minimize the weighted sum of common scheduling measures and the total cost, we present their complexity analysis and a $2$-approximation algorithm for the second problem.

In recent times, sustainability has become more important for businesses. Accordingly, product remanufacturing has emerged as an interesting topic, as it is generally considered as a profitable and environmentally friendly end-of-use management option for several products. While extant literature on remanufacturing has comprehensively studied the topic of outsourcing, it has failed to recognize that retailers also have the flexibility to engage in remanufacturing. However, in recent years, several brand name retailers have established remanufacturing operations. The following question arises: Should original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) outsource their remanufacturing operations to their retailers? To answer this question, two models are developed in which an OEM interacts with an independent retailer on remanufacturing operations with the option to either remanufacture all products in-house (Model M) or outsource remanufacturing to their retailer (Model R). The result shows that although model M potentially facilitates greater economic, social, and environmental sustainability, it has costs for the retailer. Finally, a revenue-sharing contract is proposed to achieve a “win-win-win” outcome that has economic, social, and environmental benefits for all parties.