Abstract
Offshoring emerged as a major business practice since the 90s. Recently the phenomenon seems to be affected by the decrease in cost advantages of developing economies, the consequences of the 2008/09 economic crisis and the advent of new technologies (Industry 4.0). This paper investigates how offshoring geographies and drivers have changed over the last fifteen years. Based on a longitudinal analysis, we identified three different phases. Specifically, while the number of offshoring cases progressively decreases, we observed that location decisions are less driven by cost-related motivations and more by technological and market-related drivers.