Washington: Deploring attacks by both Democrats and Republicans on outsourcing of jobs to countries like India, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has said the US benefits by free trade in goods and services, and not by withdrawing into a shell.

"Closing the door to the service trade is a strategy for killing jobs, not saving them," visiting WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi said at the National Press Club, where both media persons and officials were present.

"We especially need to inject some clarity and facts into the current debate over the outsourcing of services jobs. Over the next decade, the US is projected to create an average of more than 2 million new services jobs a year, compared to roughly 200,000 services jobs that will be outsourced," he said.

He said the issue of outsourcing "is the source of much anxiety in America today. Many Americans worry about the potential job losses that might arise from foreign competition in services sectors. But it's worth remembering that concerns about the impact of foreign competition are not new. Many of the reservations people are expressing today are echoes of what we heard in the 1970s and 1980s."

"But people at that time didn't fully appreciate the power of American ingenuity. Remarkable advances in technology and productivity laid the foundation for unprecedented job creation in the 1990s and there is no reason to doubt that this country, which has shown time and again such remarkable potential for competing in the global economy, will not soon embark again on such a burst of job creation."