Business process outsourcing: the Philippine experience

Abstract

This paper seeks to benchmark the Philippines and India in a global outsourcing space for information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITES) to elicit lessons learned from national competitive positioning and strategy execution. It characterizes the ITES industry's size, share of economic output, and growth prospects. Because the ITES industry has high labor value-added, the paper explores the quality of the human resources and its impact on industry growth, specifically citing the Philippines as a case example. Next, it examines the interplay of geography and demographics in generating industry scale, using as an example the emergence of Megamanila as a concentrated conurbation for BPO and call center activity, with analogies created to the Indian regional economies. Finally, it assesses the externalities of public-private sector cooperation, multinational impetus, and market access to the end-user markets in fostering industry growth.

JEL classification: L86