Offshoring . . .

March 21, 2006

. . . is a relatively new (and somewhat more precise) term for what used to be called outsourcing. In short, offshoring involves moving business processes (e.g., manufacturing, customer service) to a foreign country in order for a company to try to achieve a strategic competitive advantage. Among the countries on the “receiving end” of offshoring are China, Taiwan, and India.

The March issue of Wired contains an article on one of India’s recent business process acquisitions: clinical drug trials. In “A Nation of Guinea Pigs,” author Jennifer Kahn does a good job of covering some of the pros and cons of moving clinical drug trials to India. On the pros side, the latest treatments are made available to an underserved group of people, people receive these treatments free of charge, money for new facilities flows in. On the cons side are communication issues, attitudes toward doctors (“They will almost never question their doctor”), treatments are free only during the trial period, and corruption issues that inevitably follow an influx of money. Of course, the Western world is not free of these problems either.

No doubt globalization is making our world smaller—flat even, in the view of one economist. Bioethics raises serious questions right along other issues of globalization, and our ethics framework must address these global questions.