The jobs at risk from globalization: the French case

This article analyzes the effect of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on the workforce composition in French firms. We use a detailed employer-employee database constructed with four comprehensive datasets of French manufacturing firms over the period 2002–2007, in order to analyze changes in the workforce composition in terms of skills and tasks. To deal with endogeneity issues, we propose an IV strategy where the level of infrastructure and GDP per capita in the host countries are used as instruments. The fixed effect results show that FDI to low-income countries raises significantly the share of executives and reduces the share of blue-collar workers in company workforces in France. Outward FDI to high-income countries affects negatively the share of workers performing non-routine manual tasks. When controlling for endogeneity, the IV results further show an overall positive effect of offshoring for employees performing interactive and analytical tasks, such as engineers and managers.