Fears that an exodus of white-collar jobs to India and other low-wage economies will lead to massive employment losses in rich countries such as the United States and Britain are not backed up by the facts, according to new research.

In a working paper for the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, two International Monetary Fund staffers discover no evidence that job growth in Britain is slower in those sectors with a quicker pace of service outsourcing.

They also find no link between job losses and outsourcing in the United States because outsourcing, by boosting firms' efficiency, creates enough new jobs to offset the initial losses.

"The risk of service outsourcing dramatically reducing job growth in the advanced economies has been greatly exaggerated," IMF

researchers Mary Amiti and Shang-Jin Wei write.

Their findings chime with similarly positive assessments by analysts including Diana Farrell of McKinsey Global Institute in San Francisco and Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

But outsourcing remains a political hot potato.

In the race for the White House, Democratic candidate John Kerry has blamed President George W. Bush for a shift of white-collar and manufacturing jobs overseas.

In Britain, unions have led opposition to the trend, which was underscored on Thursday when Reuters said it planned to make Bangalore in southern India its biggest information-gathering hub. The news provider will employ as many as 1,500 people there, or 10 percent of its workforce.

While outsourcing has been increasing steadily, Amiti and Wei

say it is still at very low levels.

In balance-of-payments statistics, outsourced services count as imports. In the United States, such imports of computing and business services have roughly doubled since 1993 thanks to the growth of fast, cheap telecommunications but were still only 0.4 percent of gross domestic product in 2003.

In Britain, the share was 1.2 percent.

Outsourcing as a share of GDP is much more important in smaller countries. Angola, Mozambique and Ireland all import business services exceeding 10 percent of GDP.

Ironically, India also imports a larger share of business services (2.4 percent of GDP) than the United States or Britain.

"In sum, the notion that large industrialised countries outsource more intensely than other economies is not supported by the trade data," Amiti and Wei write.