In support of their argument two made indisputable

The crisis will mark the end of the extraordinary cycle of globalization started there is slightly more than twenty years Already, international trade has been a blow to stop even more important than the rest of the economy. As last week the Economist Thierry Verdier during the days of the economy of Lyon, he collapsed from 30 in volume, while global production, measured by GDP, contracted "" by 8. The main explanation for this "overreaction" lies in the fact that China, then the India has helped to large multinational companies of their value chain by assigning more tasks to these low labour cost countries. Gradually, this process has led to an international division of labour and tasks. Taiwan and Beijing, the production; to the Americans or Europeans, design, marketing and distribution of these same products. No other sector applied as fully this approach that industrialists of the high-tech such as Apple, HP or IBM.

Prosperity had used us "douceurs" of globalization, in the words of Thierry Verdier: low prices, variety, innovation. The crisis, with its procession of unemployed, brings back us to his bitterness: loss of jobs, factories, industries.

More and more industrial and American intellectuals to alarm of the negative impact of relocations. Witness, the debate around a sensationalist article (1) by professors Gary Pisano and William Shih of Harvard University on the loss of competitiveness of America. In support of their argument, two made indisputable. On the one hand, degradation continues the trade balance American, heavily loss-making, including in the key technology sector information (from a surplus of $ 28 billion in 2000 to a deficit of 53 billion in 2007), and on the other hand, the stagnation of the average wages since 1980. A country that is more important that it exports and whose wages are not progressing is a country which loses its competitiveness, provide.

For them, il it is clear that the main culprit is the massive relocation that losing not only jobs but also the entire segments of the industry. It makes more in the United States of LCD screens, diode LEDs for lighting or Boeing 787 carbon fibre components. But innovation is increasingly tied to a close dialogue between researchers and producers. In addition, in some areas, key components may become carriers of a technological revolution. This is the case of the batteries in new generation, America produces more and become critical for the passage to the electric car. Finally, the need for these skills vanished, it is upstream any educational which dries. For authors, industrial individually rational decisions collectively are destructive of what they call "industrial common property", strategic for the future of the country's competitiveness and well-being of its inhabitants.

Since the publication of the article, the blog of the Harvard Business Review on the subject (2) désemplit not reactions of anonymous, deemed to be industrial or great teachers. For the famous economist Laura Andrea Tyson, former advisor to Bill Clinton, this catastrophic theory fails the test of facts. It recalls that the global dominance of the high-tech American remained overwhelming from 1995 to 2005, around 40 of the market, and that economic research prove that outsourcing helped companies develop significantly their turnover, and thus also increase employment and activity on American soil. David Yoffie, another Harvard Professor, recalled that, in the field of electronic components, the appearance of sub-contractors specialised in microelectronics at Taiwan has enabled the development of American Electronics without plant, such as Qualcomm, who have not seen the day if it had taken some necessary billion for plant. Similarly Apple has developed extraordinarily, multiplying its sales by more than six, since that it stopped any industrial activity, resting on its Chinese subcontractors. Without rejecting the interests of the "outsourcing" for highly commoditized activities, authors remain convinced that the table degrades at high speed. They therefore call for the State to assist in the reconstruction of industrial nuclei.

This bright and fed debate reminiscent who was born at the end of the 1980s the work of researchers from MIT and worried about the loss of competitiveness of the United States face... to the Japan. Yet, twenty years later, it is the Japan who had lost much of its information technology competence and America that brought only the Internet revolution. The problem is that the movement has accelerated in recent years, with the emergence of local competitors, such as Huawei in Telecom or Acer in microcomputers. The answer is in the form of challenge for Western companies: control the evolution of its perimeter of activity between what they keep internally and what they relocate, which requires see far beyond quarterly financial constraints, and also thinking in terms of systemic with the concern to maintain proximity industrial fabric, which implies to see wide. See far and wide while we swim in full fog, this is not easier and yet never was also necessary.