Offshore outsourcing is the practice of hiring an external organization to perform some business functions in a country other than the one where the products or services are actually developed or manufactured. It can be contrasted with offshoring, in which the functions are performed in a foreign country by a foreign subsidiary. Opponents point out that the practice of sending work overseas by countries with higher wages reduces their own domestic employment and domestic investment. Many customer service jobs as well as jobs in the information technology sectors data processing, computer programming, and technical support) in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom - have been or are potentially affected.

Some of the major countries/districts that provide such services are India ( Full Spectrum Services ), Ukraine (Programming and R&D), Brazil (Web & Software Programming,Game Development,IT Support,Network Solutions,Offshore Outsourcing Service), Argentina (Web & Software Programming,Game Development,IT Support,Network Solutions,Offshore Outsourcing Service), The widespread use and availability of the Internet has enabled individuals and small businesses to contract freelancers from all over the world to get projects done at a lower cost due to lower wages and property prices. Crowd sourcing systems such as Mechanical Turk have added the element of scalability, allowing businesses to outsource information tasks across the Internet to thousands of workers.

Off shoring describes the relocation by a company of a business process from one country to another typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or a supporting processes, such as accounting. The term is in use in several distinct but closely related ways. It is sometimes used broadly to include substitution of a service from any foreign source for a service formerly produced internally to the firm. In other cases, only imported services from subsidiaries or other closely related suppliers are included. A further complication is that intermediate goods, such as partially completed computers, are not consistently included in the scope of the term. A business process begins with a customer need and ends with a customer need fulfillment. Process oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos.

A business process can be decomposed into several sub-processes, which have their own attributes, but also contribute to achieving the goal of the super-process. The analysis of business processes typically includes the mapping of processes and sub-processes down to activity level.One issue off shoring of technical services has brought more attention to is the value of education as an alleged solution to trade-related displacements. Education may no longer be a comparative advantage of high-wage nations because the cost of education may be lower in the nations involved in the controversy.

While it is true that education is usually considered helpful to competitiveness in general, an education arms race with low-wage nations may not pay off. In international trade, the principle of comparative advantage refers to the fact that although one country may have an absolute disadvantage with another, value can be created for both countries by allocating resources to the most competitive area of the disadvantaged country. This is because an opportunity cost is created when the advantaged country spreads resources across multiple activities instead of concentrating them in its area of greatest strength.