If corporate competitiveness is defined by a willingness to offshore jobs then a recent survey suggests UK corporates are leading the way by planning to move 3% of its jobs offshore over the next ten years.
Europe as a whole will lose up to 1.2 million jobs to offshore locations by 2015. Contributing to the trend are those corporates willing to look beyond Europe's border for efficiency, notably in shared service locations for centralised treasury operations, or in call centres.
Germany, France and Italy are reportedly set to lose 140,000 jobs to outsourcing by 2015 while Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain will lose less than one percent of their total - much less in real terms. Though Europe's politicians will not be celebrating, the author of the report, Forrester Research, concludes that countries less willing to move jobs out of the country - like Germany or France - will suffer from this trend.
"It is not the loss of jobs that will have most impact, but the lost competitiveness that will result for offshore-shy companies from Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands," says Andrew Parker, research director at Forrester. "The laggards who fail to exploit the offshore opportunity risk losing out in terms of profitability," he adds.