Surviving in Off-shore Locations: Manufacturing Back-shoring in the EU and the US

We throw light on factors affecting the duration of manufacturing off-shoring prior to the back-shoring of operations for EU and US based companies. We use a firm-level data set including 295 return experiences enacted by manufacturers with production activities abroad, to which we apply a survival modeling approach. Two models encompassing different hypotheses about the distribution of off-shoring duration are estimated, namely a model assuming a Weibull distribution of survival times and a Cox proportional hazard model. Results from both models signal that the industry, the host country of off-shoring, and the size of the firm are relevant in determining the timing of back-shoring