Asian-Pacific Economic Literature最新文献

Several studies on cultural clusters classify Japan as independent, meaning that wherever Japanese firms go abroad, they must adapt to very different environments. This study examines how Japanese firms treat deterrent effects of geographic distance, cultural distance, and political hazards and whether the deterrent effects may vary with firm size, firm age, and ownership solution. Results using data on Japanese firms' outbound mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from 2010 to 2019 reveal that (1) only the deterrent effect of geographic distance is absolute. (2) Larger firms with larger slack resources in their home country are less concerned about geographic distances and political hazards. (3) Older firms, exposed to typical practices and norms for a long time, are less adaptable to cultural distances. (4) The deterrent effect of geographic distance is weaker for complete control mode on the one hand, on the other hand, the moderating effect of complete control mode on political hazards hinges on firm size and age due to trade-offs between integration benefits and resource/experience constraints.

This study explores the effects of rules of origin (ROOs) and tariff margin on China's export enterprise using Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimation and logit models with product-level data under the China–Korea Free Trade Agreement (CKFTA). The findings reveal that increased ROOs have a negative effect on export value and enterprises' CKFTA use, while tariff margin is positively associated with export value. The estimation results examining export value also demonstrate that the effect of ROO is larger than that of tariff margin (in absolute terms); however, those concerning CKFTA use are the opposite. The study proposes suggestions for reducing enterprises' costs to promote trade and economic development between China and South Korea under the CKFTA based on the results.

This study aims to examine the effect of manufacturing growth by testing Kaldor's first law. The contributions of this study are as follows: (1) testing the effect of Kaldor's first law while considering Vietnam's recent manufacturing development, (2) clarifying which industries have the weakest effect, and (3) proposing a policy direction to expand the effect to the entire Vietnamese economy. The empirical analysis identified that the effect on the service industry is lower than that in other key Southeast Asian countries, as Vietnam's foreign dependency on the service industry for manufacturing exports is higher than theirs. To maximise this effect, the Vietnamese government should encourage the development of a support industry related to manufacturing and appeal to multi-national corporations for investment.

To date the analysis on the wage penalty faced by over-educated doctorate holders is surprisingly scarce. Being focused on college graduates, the existing literature has primarily tended to adopt a standard ordinary least squares regression technique that allows measuring the impact of over-education on the conditional mean of the wage distribution. This paper aims to fill this gap, not only by assessing the extent to which the prevalence of over-educated doctorate holders in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in South Korea is distributed across the wage distribution, but also by examining the extent to which their wage penalty relative to what they could have earned in a job corresponding to their level of education may have varied across the wage distribution. The main findings reveal that there is no evidence to support the notion that over-education and ability are inversely related among STEM doctorate holders in Korea. Based on the empirical evidence, this article suggests that it is an oversimplification to characterise both the incidence and the wage effects of over-education as merely reflecting lower-ability levels, at least in the Korean context.

The present study is aimed to identify an ideal mechanism to reduce negative effect of minimum wage on youth employment generation. Using available data from Department of Statistics, the study runs an annual panel regression at the state level based on fixed effect specification model. The finding demonstrates that the minimum wage has a negative effect on employment, particularly among youth. It implies that there is an excess of labour supply in the market at the current wage rate. As a result, the rate set is higher than equilibrium, signifying firm disadvantages. The negative effect is more prevalent if the single national minimum wage rate policy is applied to all states. Therefore, the national wage policy should be thoroughly examined. Instead, a regional wage rate should be explored as a potential solution for mitigating and preventing negative employment effects.

Using panel data of the A-share listed firms in China from 2015 to 2021, this article studies the impact of feminism-related public discussions on the promotion of female senior executives. Empirical results find that feminism-related public discussion can push firms to increase the ratio of female senior executives. Further research finds that the effect is more significant in firms whose chairmen are male, firms that are not state-owned enterprises, and firms whose employees are better educated. In addition, economic consequences tests show that when the public pays more attention to feminism, a high ratio of female senior executives can contribute to improving firm value. The findings in this article can be conducive to understanding the influence of public opinion on female career development and firms' decision-making.

The study aims to identify the motives of foreign direct investment in Nepal and analyse the perceived strengths and weaknesses of investment climate. Additionally, it examines the experience of foreign investors in Nepal in terms of further investment plans and net promoter scores attributed to the host country. The study relies on primary data collected from the survey of 65 sampled industries with foreign direct investment, using structured questionnaires. Descriptive analysis has been used to assess the key factors motivating foreign investors. The findings reveal that labour cost, repatriation facility, industrial security, low operating costs, access to neighbouring market/trade openness, and investment and communal hospitality stand out as major motivating factors, while political instability, macroeconomic instability, availability of machinery and equipment, road access, and bureaucracy are the major precluding factors. The policy reforms in Nepal have notably shaped investors' perceptions. Acts like the Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act, 1992, and subsequent amendments such as the Foreign Investment and Loan Management, 2021, have significantly motivated investors by improving repatriation facilities and ease of VISA and work permit accessibility. Despite the efforts, land facilitation for foreign investors has been perceived as a weakness. The net promoter score for Nepal is 12 on a scale from −100 to +100, which is positive, albeit low, indicating a substantial gap to attain full promoters and needs to be improved by further enhancing the investment climate.

This study empirically investigates the dynamic effects of weather shock on within-country income inequality. Using panel data of 17 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) member economies, we estimate impulse responses via the local projection method. Moreover, temperature and precipitation shocks, defined as deviations of temperature and precipitation from their historical norms, are exploited to measure country-specific weather shocks. The empirical results reveal the following. First, temperature and precipitation shocks deteriorate income inequality measured by the Gini index; these effects are long-lasting. Moreover, asymmetric effects exist: heat waves and droughts more significantly increase income inequality than cold waves and floods. Lastly, current redistribution policies do not seem to effectively mitigate those adverse effects.

The paper examines the role of the absorptive capacity of Vietnamese manufacturing firms in facilitating the link from Japanese spillovers to the productivity of local firms in the manufacturing sector. By using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and threshold regression model with dynamic panel data from 2005 to 2018, the paper finds the following points. Firstly, the appearance and operation of Japanese firms can bring the positive horizontal labour effect and backward competition effect but it also brings the negative backward labour effect. Secondly, the absorptive capacity of domestic firms can help reduce the negative spillover effects and increase the positive spillover effects. Finally, if domestic firms cannot reach a threshold of absorptive capacity, they will suffer from Japanese spillovers while if they meet the threshold of absorptive capacity, they can enjoy the externalities from the operation and cooperation with Japanese firms.

Market-based environmental regulation is crucial in influencing environmental and socioeconomic development. Carbon emission trading (CET) policy in China has been implemented since 2012 to balance the environment and economy, especially the green total factor productivity (GTFP). Most previous studies have only conducted short-term investigations on the impact of CET on environmental and socioeconomic development. In this study, we investigated panel data from 30 regions in China during 2003–2019, adopted the Global Malmquist-Luenberger and Super-SBM methods to measure GTFP, and employed the propensity score matched difference in difference (PSM-DID) to investigate the effect of CET policy on the environment, GTFP, and secondary industry output. The results indicate that CET policy has a positive influence on carbon emission reduction, contributes to the improvement of GTFP, and provides economic value. Therefore, we believe that CET policy can effectively help China to achieve a win-win scenario of environmental protection and economic growth.