The fear that large numbers of high quality jobs are being outsourced to rapidly developing countries is overstated, according to a report by The Work Foundation.

The research found that just 5.5% of all jobs lost across Europe were due to off-shoring activities in the first quarter of 2007, the figure was 3.4% in 2005. It found that jobs in sectors thought of as being vulnerable to outsourcing such as call centres have gone up rather than down in the UK.

The report found that travel (£626m) and transportation (£289m) are the largest services imported from India while computer and information services (£122m) are only the third largest import category.

Katerina Rüdiger, author of the paper, says: “The evidence suggests that while trade in services between the UK and India is certainly rising, it is not happening nearly as fast as is sometimes imagined – it’s less of an explosion more of a slow evolution.”