U.S. manufacturing payrolls in tariff-protected sectors grew 3.1% last quarter — the strongest signal since 2017 that selective trade defenses are reshaping onshore investment.

On Open-Access Longitudinal Data

For more than a decade, the institute has maintained the world's largest open-access dataset on the wage and employment effects of offshoring. The Offshoring Impact Database covers 41 countries in quarterly resolution from 1995 to the present and is freely available to academic researchers, parliamentary staff, union economists, and trade-press journalists on a single signed terms-of-use agreement.

We make the data open because the alternative — keeping it locked inside paywalled academic journals — serves no one. The empirical record on offshoring should be checkable by the legislators whose votes turn that record into policy. When the German Economic Ministry wished to model the employment effects of CBAM in 2023, it used our series directly. When the United States Trade Representative prepared its Section-301 tariff review, the dataset was incorporated by reference. When the Italian Ministry of Enterprises revised its golden-power screening thresholds, our bilateral investment-flow tables appeared in the technical annex.

This is the institute's signature instrument, and it is the reason our briefs are cited: they are built on a foundation that anyone with a spreadsheet and a few weekends can audit for themselves.