In this book, Radlo increases understanding of offshoring, outsourcing and international production fragmentation, and explains the impact of this phenomenon on the economies and enterprises. Key features include a comprehensive theoretical explanation of offshoring and outsourcing at both macroeconomic and microeconomic level, as well as an explanation of practical consequences of the mentioned phenomenon for the development of the global economy, national economies, concrete industries and enterprises. Unlike other publications, which are often characterized by narrow management or a macroeconomic approach to the analysis of offshoring and outsourcing, Radlo's text offers real insight into the global impact of production fragmentation.

Outsourcing Economics has a double meaning. First, it is a book about the economics of outsourcing. Second, it examines the way that economists have understood globalization as a pure market phenomenon, and as a result have 'outsourced' the explanation of world economic forces to other disciplines. Markets are embedded in a set of institutions - labor, government, corporate, civil society, and household - that mold the power asymmetries that influence the distribution of the gains from globalization. In this book, William Milberg and Deborah Winkler propose an institutional theory of trade and development starting with the growth of global value chains - international networks of production that have restructured the global economy and its governance over the past twenty-five years. They find that offshoring leads to greater economic insecurity in industrialized countries that lack institutions supporting workers. They also find that offshoring allows firms to reduce domestic investment and focus on finance and short-run stock movements.