14M Jobs at Risk for Offshoring?

About 14 million U.S. jobs are at risk for offshoring, and about 3.5 million of them are likely to be offshored, according to Dwight M. Jaffee, a finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley.Speaking at a panel session on the impact of outsourcing at the Urban Land Institute's fall meeting in New York City, Mr. Jaffee mentioned Dallas as a city that has a high concentration of jobs that are vulnerable to offshoring. Other cities on the list include Washington; Atlanta; Boston; San Jose, Calif.; and Stamford, Conn., he said. Based on one estimate of 250 square feet of office space per U.S. office sector worker, this translates into an implied loss of about 875 million square feet of office space, or about 6.7% of the office space in the United States, according to Mr. Jaffee. Another panelist, Leann Lachmann, president of New York-based Lachmann Associates, said she believes the nation is not creating replacement jobs for the ones lost to offshoring. Therefore, she said she expects the next three to five years to be "dire" for office landlords. Joseph Gyourko, a finance professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said offshoring is "productivity enhancing" and "encourages us to focus on things we are relatively good at."