Globalization of R&D and China: An Introduction

Outsourcing and offshoring have become eye-catching topics in the media as well as academic research, and China and India have become major recipients and providers of such activities, with China a major attraction for manufacturing and India a primary location for outsourced services. As Thomas Friedman explains in his bestselling book, The World is Flat, outsourcing is an inevitable trend in an increasingly flattened world. At the same time, this world is spiky, too, with China being one of the most pronounced spikes of production, population and investment.