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This paper summarizes the phenomenon of offshore outsourcing and relates it to the history and current state of engineering education and the engineering profession in Europe and the USA. In order to assess the climate affecting employment decisions by and about engineers we have used as sources mostly the serious press, with an emphasis on material dating from 2004 forward. The authors conclude that despite anxiety about the out-migration of engineering and technical jobs to places such as India and China, there is reason to see offshoring as the result of Western investment in capacity building in developing countries and to believe that the creation of new jobs will outpace the rate of job loss in Europe and the USA. The paper should serve as a prod to policy-makers and educators to set about creating an environment in which highly educated engineers and technical employees can continue a pattern of economic revitalization.

This paper studies the impact of trade openness and the proportion of exporters on environmental quality through the scale, composition and technique effects from 1998 to 2007 using firm- and city-level data for 287 Chinese cities. Our results reveal that, on average, trade openness has a detrimental impact on the environment in Chinese cities, but this impact remains heterogeneous across regions. A higher proportion of exporters improves the environment in central and eastern cities while generating nevertheless more pollution in western cities. As regards the sector-specific impact, we find that the higher proportion of exporters in the mining and less-polluting manufacturing sectors in eastern cities diminishes the emissions of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5). Our finding also suggests that a pollution haven effect emerges in China at the city level. Finally, our results confirm the presence of an environmental Kuznets curve effect for the PM2.5 pollutant across Chinese cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]