Does fragmentation of production imply fragmentation of jobs?

The possibility of deepening international specialization through trade in tasks has raised concerns about jobs and earnings in occupations hitherto sheltered from international competition. Trade in tasks cannot be measured directly. It is, however possible study how recent developments in international trade patterns are associated with changes in the task content of local production. From a labour market point of view this is the interesting question. The task content of goods and services is estimated by combining information from the O*Net database on the importance of a set of 41 tasks for a large number of occupations and information on employment by occupation and industry. The study shows that tasks that can be digitised and offshored are often complementary to tasks that cannot. We therefore cluster tasks that tend to be performed together across occupations and analyse how changes in the content of these task clusters are associated with international trade. Import penetration in business services is associated with a shift in local task content from information and communication related tasks towards tasks related to handling machinery and equipment, while import penetration of other services has exactly the opposite effect. It appears that offshoring of business services complements manufacturing activities while offshoring of other services complements local information-intensive tasks.