Outsourcing is here to stay: Obama aide

Notwithstanding the charges being leveled by the Obama Campaign against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney of outsourcing jobs overseas, a top Obama aide has said that both outsourcing and insourcing are here to stay in this highly globalised world.

"It is important to recognise that insourcing, outsourcing, supply chain complexity, supply chain disaggregation, is here to stay," Laura Tyson, former Clinton Administration Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and now an economic policy advisor to the Obama Campaign, said on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention here.

"The challenge for the US is to make the US a very attractive place to do business so the US companies decide to stay, bring back, and foreign companies continue to move here. And we shouldn't do anything, as I said, in a biased way to influence outsourcing or insourcing by our tax codes. We have to change our corporate tax code. The President has embraced that," she told reporters in response to a question.

Democratic leaders have accused wealthy Romney of being pioneer of outsourcing jobs to overseas and stacking his money in foreign banks.

Tyson said President Barack Obama last year had a big conference on insourcing, the fact that US companies are beginning, because the energy price environment and the labor cost environment are more attractive, they're beginning to say at the margins we ll keep some jobs in the US or they will bring some jobs back.

"So the first thing is the improving cost environment. The second thing is the President has said we should not have in our tax policy policies which actually reduce taxes to help companies move abroad, but then actually we also have taxes which make it less attractive for them to bring the jobs home. Why are we doing that? We need to reform the corporate tax code so it's neither an incentive or a help to send jobs abroad, nor is it a disincentive to bring jobs home," she said.

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