AbstractsEngineering

International outsourcing has become a competitive strategy in manufacturing industries due to the issue of limited resources and associated economic benefits. Although international outsourcing seems to be a cost efficient way of production, the concerns about its impacts on the sustainability of societies are rising significantly. In order to have sustainable societies, the industrial managers need to control and quantify the static and dynamic social, economic and environmental impacts of their international outsourcing decisions. Nevertheless, there is a gap in the literature for quantifying these social, economic, and environmental impacts. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to develop a decision support system to quantify the explained impacts. In this research, the number of employees in the industries, gross value added (GVA) and CO2 emissions were selected as the social, economic and environmental indicators at the macro level respectively. Input output analysis and linear programming were implemented by programming in Matlab software as the research methodology for studying the static impacts of international outsourcing. Then, different econometric methods were applied with system dynamic method for investigating the dynamic impacts. Five different case studies have been investigated in this research. The static results depicted that the international outsourcing reduces not only the aforementioned sustainability indicators of the outsourcer industry but also for the domestic suppliers of the outsourcer industry. In these case studies, the sustainability indicators in the outsourcee countries were also quantified. In the last three case studies, static evaluation demonstrated that the international outsourcing will increase the total CO2 emissions and number of employees while decrease the total GVA. The dynamic results in the last two case studies presented that international outsourcing will increase the combined CO2 emissions and number of employees of the outsourcer and outsourcee countries while reducing the combined GVA of countries from the global perspective. In contrast, the results of third case study demonstrated that the international outsourcing will increase all aforementioned sustainability indicators of the outsourcer and outsourcee countries together. The reason for the different results in terms of the total GVA is the various production technologies of countries used in the future.