Flexicurity and relocation of manufacturing

This paper analyzes the relevance of flexibility and security in the context of reshoring manufacturing to high cost countries. The authors adopted the term flexicurity as a combination of flexibility, measured by a high level of worker mobility between jobs, social security, representing a generous system of social welfare and unemployment benefits, and active labor market programs. The paper presents data from a Danish questionnaire-survey on offshoring and reshoring manufacturing and empirical insights from two illustrative case studies. The cases demonstrate that the flexicurity model has played an important role in the relocation of manufacturing to Denmark. Data from the questionnaire-survey indicates some focus on flexicurity as a factor for moving manufacturing back to home countries.