Umiędzynarodowienie sektora usług

The paper examines trends such as outsourcing and offshoring in international service operations, focusing on the macroeconomic and international aspects of the process. This especially involves determining the causes and scope of offshoring and the factors that encourage companies to move their service operations abroad. Grzanka also looks at the directions of these activities and the scope of the process. There is no uniform, precise definition of offshoring, the author notes, which is one of the reasons why it is impossible to determine the precise scope of this process. However, statistical research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) involving the trade of services—confirmed by research conducted by Bardhan and Kroll (2003), Jensen and Kletzer (2005) and Van Welsum and Reif (2006), as well as polls carried out among businesses in the Netherlands and Denmark—shows that outsourcing and offshoring are still at an inceptive stage, and the scope of these operations is bound to increase in the future, especially in Europe. Poland is a host country for foreign direct investment and a destination for offshoring operations. As investors increasingly eye Central and Eastern European markets, attracting more offshoring investors to Poland will require further transformations in the country’s economy.