Globalization of the ICT Labour Force- van Dijk

William Lazonick is an economics professor and a director of the University of Massachusetts Center for Industrial Competitiveness and President of The Academic-Industry Research network, which is a non-profit organization. He has also taught in the economics department at Harvard, Barnard College of Columbia University and he worked as a Distinguished Research Professor at INSEAD in France. Lazonick has written seven books relating to business and the economy, and the article that he wrote that we are reading for this class is a chapter of a book called The Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies, which has a compilation of articles from different scholars. This book was written for an audience that consists of academics, researchers, and graduate students who are studying information and communication technologies.

This article, “Globalization of the ICT Labour Force” talks about the offshoring production activities of US information and communication technology companies. Very recently, offshoring was done in the “search for low-wage labour to perform relatively high-skill work” (Lazonick, 5). This article looks at several different Asian countries, such as China, Korea, India, and Malaysia, and how the “brain drain,” an event in which Asian science and engineer students and employers have left their countries and moved to the United States to get a degree and work here. This “brain drain” has positively affected the United States, however, has been a hard hit to these Asian countries, because, their most talented and skilled scientists and engineers have left their country to work in the US.

These Asian countries started to reverse the “brain drain,” which had a very positive influence on their economies. They started creating high paying, intense jobs, which attracted indigenous citizens to come back to their home country and work there instead. Motorola Korea started a very significant “brain drain,” and brought back many Koreans who had previously been working in the United States.

In this article, William Lazonick looks at how there have been flows of US capital to East Asian countries, as well as flows of East-Asian labor to the US capital. The “brain drain” has caused major problems for east Asian countries, such as Korea, and they lost many talented scientist and engineers to the United States. However, with the creation of the KIST, the first Korean graduate program, Korea, for example, was able to bring back its citizens.
I think that these programs are such important aspects to the economy of these East Asian countries, and will make them very strong. They need strong education programs in order to train their citizens to do the labor that they once were being taught in the United States, in their own country, so that they can provide goods and services to their country. Lazonick states in his chapter that “the availability of an indigenous supply of high-skill labour was critical for upgrading productive capabilities so that the ICT industries of these nations, and the offshored facilities, could remain competitive as these East-Asian economies transformed themselves from relatively low-wage to relatively high-wage” (78). I believe that this was a crucial change that needed to be made in order to build up the economy and ICT industries in these countries.