IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rif/dpaper/1140.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

IT Outsourcing in Finnish Business

Author

Listed:
  • Maliranta, Mika
  • Rouvinen, Petri
  • Airaksinen, Aarno

Abstract

This paper reviews the characteristics and magnitude of information technology (IT) outsourcing as well as studies its labor productivity effects with a representative sample of Finnish businesses. Depending on the IT task in question, on average from one-third to two-thirds of IT has been outsourced; of the ten categories considered, the development of non-Internet business-to-business applications (e.g., EDI) is the leading activity in this respect. The various dimensions of IT outsourcing are all highly positively correlated. After controlling for industry and regional effects as well as characteristics of firms and their employees, it is found that an externally-supported computer user is about 20% more productive than an otherwise similar worker without a computer, which corresponds to about 5% output elasticity of outsourced IT; the effect of internally-supported computer use is not statistically significantly different for zero, and it is also several times smaller in magnitude. While the issues of causality, timing, self-selection, and unobserved firm heterogeneity are not fully addressed, the findings nevertheless suggest that IT outsourcing may have significant economic consequences.

Suggested Citation

  • Maliranta, Mika & Rouvinen, Petri & Airaksinen, Aarno, 2008. "IT Outsourcing in Finnish Business," Discussion Papers 1140, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
  • Handle: RePEc:rif:dpaper:1140
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.etla.fi/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/dp1140.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Irene Bertschek & Daniel Erdsiek & Manuel Trenz, 2017. "IT Outsourcing—A Source of Innovation? Microeconometric Evidence for Germany," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 38(7), pages 941-954, October.
    2. Ohnemus, Jörg, 2009. "Productivity effects of business process outsourcing: a firm-level investigation based on panel data," ZEW Discussion Papers 09-088, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    3. Petri Böckerman & Elisa Riihimäki, 2009. "International outsourcing and labour demand: Evidence from Finnish firm-level data," Working Papers 252, Työn ja talouden tutkimus LABORE, The Labour Institute for Economic Research LABORE.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    labor productivity; information technology; computers; outsourcing Finnish business;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
    • D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Cost; Capital; Capital, Total Factor, and Multifactor Productivity; Capacity
    • L14 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Transactional Relationships; Contracts and Reputation
    • L24 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Contracting Out; Joint Ventures

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rif:dpaper:1140. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kaija Hyvönen-Rajecki (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/etlaafi.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.