London, July 11:

The fear of large numbers of good quality British jobs being outsourced to rapidly developing countries such as India may be overstated, sta-tes a new report published by The Work Foundation.

Despite the rhetoric of an abundance of Indian knowledge workers hungry for British jobs, there is little direct evidence so far of significant job migration, the report finds, setting at rest fears that India is taking away a large number of British jobs. The report also says that British trade in information and communications services with developed countries such as Germany dwarfs that with India. The Work Foundation is an independent research organisation and consultancy.

The report finds that according to independent analysis just 5.5 per cent of all jobs lost across Europe were due to offshoring activities in the first quarter of 2007. In 2005 the figure was 3.4 per cent.

Meanwhile, jobs in sectors theoretically vulnerable to outsourcing such as call centres have gone up rather th-an down in Britain. The rep-ort says travel (£626 million) and transportation (£289 million) are the largest services imported from India.