First of all I want to say this article is created for ones who wants to enlarge theirs mental outlook and (or) make decision are you really need to use offshore development services. If you have no time to read large popular scientific articles and just want to:

• Discuss any business proposition
  
• Make inquiries
  
• Order software or web site development
  
• Get support
  

The most popular freelancing countries are India, Pakistan, Russia, Ukraine and Romania. Now I will describe you the "national coloring" of all these countries.

India and Pakistan. These two countries were real symbol of freelancing idea in near past. Both ones have a very large population and as a result a low living standard. Cheapness is the main thing Indians can boast (some India freelancers agree to work for 30 USD per day). Indians became a cause of sufficient reduction of world average software development wages. Usually theirs professionalism and honesty are not so good as western clients are accustomed in theirs native countries. These are just some clients testimonials about Indian programmers collected from freelancer sites:

• Indians got my money and never done project (Rashid Abdulai, USA)
  
• Dodgy - tried to rip me off at the first opportunity... (Design Industries, Australia)
  
• I had lots of issues with timeliness (Russell Cummings, Australia)

The main benefits of Indians and Pakistanians is that theirs countries are included in PayPal network, so you will be able to pay them with word famous and trusted gateway.

Russia. Russian freelancers are usually more professional than Indians. The cause is that USSR had a very powerfull and free education. Lots of professional programmers and engineers had work in war industry and have become fully not called for any work after USSR crash and end of arms race. However, Russian image in world software developers community is a very bad. Russia has not laws (they are present on paper, but they never work). That is why you have to be a very attentive when you work with them. Typical fraud of Russian freelancers is to get pre-payment and dissappear. Another scenario is working from other's name (typically USA name) with fake documents.

Ukraine. For now Ukraine is the best choise for freelancer location. Ukrainian freelancers are the same professional as Russian ones. However, Ukraine is sufficiently more democratic and integrated in Europe country. The problem of Ukraine is PayPal. Ukrainians can send money with PayPal, but they can not receive because of PayPal's limitations. However, there are a lot of payment gateways and credit card processors that accept Ukrainian merchant accounts.