Productivity and wage premiums: Evidence from Vietnamese ordinary and processing exporters

We propose some new stylized facts on Vietnamese exporters that emphasize firm heterogeneity in trade regimes and firm ownership. We show first that the distribution of firms' export intensities is U-shaped with more than half of Vietnamese exporters exporting more than 50% of their output. Thi...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:International economics (Paris) 2018-08, Vol.154, p.48-67
Main Authors: Vu, Mai T.P., Bellone, Flora, Dovis, Marion
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Firm productivity
Firm-level data
Humanities and Social Sciences
Processing trade
Quantitative Finance
Vietnam
Wage
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We propose some new stylized facts on Vietnamese exporters that emphasize firm heterogeneity in trade regimes and firm ownership. We show first that the distribution of firms' export intensities is U-shaped with more than half of Vietnamese exporters exporting more than 50% of their output. This contrasts with the export patterns in industrialized countries but is similar to the export intensity distribution for other emerging economies with strong participation in global value chains. Second, we show that export premia, evaluated in terms of both productivity and wage indexes, are positive only for Vietnamese exporters involved primarily in ordinary trade, and that processing exporters exhibit lower productivity indexes and pay lower wages than their non-exporting counterparts. This pattern is more pronounced among the group of foreign-owned firms in Vietnam compared to the group of domestic firms and is in line with previous findings for China.
ISSN:2110-7017
2542-6869
DOI:10.1016/j.inteco.2017.10.006