International Economics

<< N°154

  N°154  
Issue Q2 2018  
Productivity and wage premiums: Evidence from Vietnamese ordinary and processing exporters  
Mai T.P. Vu
Flora Bellone
Marion Dovis
 
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. Abstract

   
Processing trade ; Wage ; Firm productivity ; Firm-level data ; Vietnam ; Keywords
F10 ; F14 ; L60 ; JEL classification
Order form