Asian-Pacific Economic Literature最新文献

The impact of national institutions on the economy has attracted research attention for decades. However, research on the influence of subnational institutions at the firm level is modest. This paper examines the spatial effects of institutional quality on firm performance using evidence from Vietnam. The model employed in the research is the Spatial Durbin Model (SDM), which is used to test hypotheses on data collected from enterprise surveys in the provinces of Vietnam over the period 2011–18. The research results show that the institutional quality of a locality has a direct impact on firm performance in that locality and indirectly affects firms in adjacent localities. At the same time, enterprises in different localities not only interact spatially with each but also tend to cooperate and compete. The results also show that the control of corruption positively affects the profits of enterprises; and informal charges negatively influence firms' total factor productivity in Vietnam. These findings imply that improving the quality of subnational institutions in emerging countries such as Vietnam promotes the growth of enterprises.

The causal effect of military variables on economic growth has been investigated for North Korea, using time-series data over the period 1994–2017. Regression models were constructed with three military variables that include military burden (MB), arms trade openness (ATO) and missile dummy as a proxy for technological progress in the military sector. Although military technology has been highly developed in North Korea, non-military industrial development is far behind other developing countries. The regression results show that the military variables have negative and significant effects on economic growth. The Granger causality test further confirms the causal directions from MB to economic growth, the ATO measure shows a feedback effect on economic growth, while the causal effect of missile dummy is not strong enough to be significant. The results are, in general, consistent with our proposition that military technology would not have a spillover effect on non-military industrial sectors in North Korea.

This study employs industrial survey data from China's National Bureau of Statistics covering Chinese manufacturing enterprises during the period 1998–2007 to examine the impact of urbanisation on total factor productivity (TFP) in various industries. In recent years, urbanisation development has varied greatly across China. So Chinese cities can be divided into three urbanisation categories based on the proportion of the urban population to the total population: highly urbanised areas (60 per cent and over), moderately urbanised areas (30–60 per cent), and low urbanised areas (0–30 per cent). We estimate industrial TFP levels across these three categories using the Levinsohn–Petrin semi-parametric estimation method. We also divide regional productivity into a productivity index and an industry composition index. We use aspects of these indexes to analyse the impact of urbanisation on TFP. The results confirm that urbanisation can lead to the gathering of economic activities, which in turn generates a positive impact on TFP by reducing transportation cost, promoting new technology spillovers, and encouraging a higher degree of specialisation. Further, the empirical results indicate that the highest TFP does not always occur in highly urbanised areas—most of the industries with the highest TFP are in moderately urbanised areas. These findings have important policy implications regarding how to improve the TFP of enterprises in order to generate scale effects.

In this study, we investigate the effects of the policy on the legal retirement age of 60 (or above) implemented in Korea in 2016. It was generally expected that the implementation of the policy would extend the retirement age of workers and provide them with minimum employment up to the age of 60. However, our empirical analysis provides evidence contrary to general expectations. First, post the introduction of the policy, the probability of workers retiring at the mandatory retirement age has decreased, whereas the probability of workers retiring early for involuntary reasons in their 50s has increased. Second, the workers who were predicted to benefit from the policy had trouble retaining their jobs until the legal retirement age of 60. These results demonstrate the possibility that companies attempted to terminate their senior workers before they reached the mandatory retirement age of 60 by means of recommendations to resign and offers of honourable retirement. In conclusion, we found that it is difficult to provide actual employment protection up to the legal retirement age by making it compulsory through legislation.