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Working Conditions, Export Decisions, and Firm Constraints-Evidence from Vietnamese Small and Medium Enterprises

Phan, Trang Hoai (2022)
Working Conditions, Export Decisions, and Firm Constraints-Evidence from Vietnamese Small and Medium Enterprises.
In: Sustainability, 2022, 14 (13)
doi: 10.26083/tuprints-00022089
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Item Type: Article
Type of entry: Secondary publication
Title: Working Conditions, Export Decisions, and Firm Constraints-Evidence from Vietnamese Small and Medium Enterprises
Language: English
Date: 2022
Place of Publication: Darmstadt
Year of primary publication: 2022
Publisher: MDPI
Journal or Publication Title: Sustainability
Volume of the journal: 14
Issue Number: 13
Collation: 25 Seiten
DOI: 10.26083/tuprints-00022089
Corresponding Links:
Origin: Secondary publication via sponsored Golden Open Access
Abstract:

Better working conditions promote employee creativity and loyalty. Meanwhile, a stable and skilled workforce contributes to a firm’s sustainable growth. Therefore, providing favorable working conditions is one of the critical sustainable goals of many countries worldwide. However, some critics are concerned participating in international trade causes worsening employment conditions in developing countries. Driven by these concerns, the relationship between exports and labor conditions is worth illuminating. This study adopts the data from Vietnam’s small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs). The dataset was collected by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) and the University of Copenhagen, UNU-WIDER from 2011 to 2015. Unlike previous studies, this study clusters firms by export status, including four groups: non-exporting, consecutive exporting, start-exporting, and exit-exporting. Observing dynamic exports sheds light on the effects of export decisions more thoroughly than the static export. Another contribution, this study focuses on an essential aspect of working conditions: providing fringe benefits. Subsequently, the analysis is upgraded by controlling for firm constraints as interaction variables. A major constraint and financial constraint are adopted to proxy for a firm’s constraints. This work promotes assessments to be more accurate, thereby providing more valuable information to policymakers. Finally, a robustness test is applied to each type of fringe benefit. Instrumental variables are used to solve the problem of endogeneity. The results found that exporting firms provide better working conditions. Additionally, constrained firms have worse working conditions.

Uncontrolled Keywords: working conditions; fringe benefits; export; SMEs; instrumental variable; probit regression; Vietnam
Status: Publisher's Version
URN: urn:nbn:de:tuda-tuprints-220893
Classification DDC: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
Divisions: 01 Department of Law and Economics > Volkswirtschaftliche Fachgebiete > International Economics
Date Deposited: 26 Aug 2022 12:06
Last Modified: 29 Aug 2022 07:49
URI: https://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/id/eprint/22089
PPN: 498687732
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