Using the Small and Medium Enterprise Survey in Vietnam and three proxies of innovation, we study the impact of firm innovation on on-the-job training in the manufacturing sector from 2007 through 2015. To address potential measurement errors and omitted variable problems, we use the average level of innovation in the same sector in other districts as an instrument for firms’ innovations. We find ...

Foreign investors can lodge a complaint against a host country for alleged treaty violations under the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions of bilateral investment treaties (BITs). The complaints are arbitrated internationally outside the host country’s domestic court, sometimes involve claims exceeding US$1 billion, and give rise to significant financial risk of international arbitration ...

We define and measure firm product destination year specific export quality and investigate how quality competition from China affects Indonesian firm productivity in the domestic and export markets. Our results suggest that an increase in Chinese exported product quality by 10 percent will increase the productivity of Indonesian firms by 0.4-0.5 percent in Indonesia’s domestic market, and increase ...

The impacts of imports on the domestic labour market have been hotly debated recently. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the effects of not only imports from China but also those under regional trade agreements (RTAs) on employment in Japan. As in previous studies in the literature, we found that the rise in import penetration from China significantly decreases employment in Japan. ...

This study assesses the links between global value chain (GVC) participation and the labour market to examine the relatively unexplored employment-related distribution effects of GVC integration. Based on the Mincer wage model, we examine the relationship between GVC participation and worker productivity and wages at the individual level. Our main estimation method is a simple ordinary least squares ...

Global trade is expected to suffer a significant contraction as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Did the relative importance of countries in the world trade network change as a result of the pandemic? The answer to this question is particularly important for Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries because of their strong trade linkages with China, where the COVID-19 virus originated. ...

This study investigates the impacts of integration into global value chains (GVCs) on formal and informal employment in Viet Nam. Utilising the Viet Nam Household Living Standard Surveys and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Trade in Value Added database (in 2010, 2012, and 2014), we examine how GVCs’ engagement affects the share of formal employment (through a fixed effects ...

Understanding the role of international trade is the key to understanding China’s miraculous economic growth. This paper reviews the literature on international trade in the context of China, with a focus on processing trade, trade liberalisation, and firm performance to provide a better understanding of China’s experience of opening up over the past 4 decades.

Using a two-stage estimation of matched worker-industry data from 2000 to 2011, this study investigates the impact of global value chain (GVC) integration on wages and the skill premium in 32 industries in Thailand, a country with recent heavy involvement in GVCs. This study employs foreign value added in both final and intermediate goods exports as a proxy for the degree of industry integration in ...

Since Doi Moi (Renovation) in 1986, economic integration has been an important pillar of Viet Nam’s reforms. Economic integration has gradually deepened, and even World Trade Organization accession in 2007 marked no end to Viet Nam’s economic integration process. Impact assessments of trade and investment liberalisation indicate that deepened economic integration has broadened economic opportunities, ...