Foreign Firms and Indonesian Manufacturing Wages: An Analysis with Panel Data

Wages in domestically- owned Indonesian manufacturing plants taken over by foreign firms increased sharply between the year before takeover and two years after takeover, relative to plants remaining in domestic ownership. Blue- collar wage levels in these plants had been less than 10 per cent above and white- collar wages more than 10 per cent below those in their industries a year before takeover. Two years after takeover both were more than 50 per cent above average. Wages in foreign plants taken over by domestic owners tended to rise less than average for their industries, although they remained above the domestic average. Thus, foreign firms did not select particularly high- wage plants to take over and it was foreign takeovers, rather than takeovers in general, that led to large wage increases and high wages. An econometric analysis of the whole panel found that both foreign ownership throughout the period and foreign takeover resulted in higher wages relative to domestically- owned plants. The wage effects for white- collar employees were typically around twice those for blue- collar employees. Foreign takeovers were associated with large increases in blue- collar employment and both foreign and domestic takeovers with declines in white- collar employment. However, the employment changes were not strongly related to the wage changes.FDI; Foreign ownership; Indonesia; Wages

FDI and Growth in East Asia: Lessons for Indonesia

Foreign direct investment has been important in the economic growth and global economic integration of developing countries over the last decades. Both Northeast and Southeast Asia, especially the latter, have been part of this development with increasing inflows of FDI and greater foreign participation in their economies. However, Indonesia has been an outlier within the region, with lower inflows of FDI than other countries, especially in manufacturing, and with lower inflows than could be expected from its size and other country characteristics. The inflows of FDI that have taken place have benefited Indonesia and we use the Asian experience to provide some suggestions as to what measures would increase FDI. A relatively poor business environment with inefficient institutions seems to be an important explanation behind the low inflows of FDI.East Asia; Northeast Asia; Southeast Asia; Indonesia; Foreign Direct Investment; Multinational Firms

South-South FDI and Development in East Asia

This paper attempts to measure the size of South-South FDI in developing East Asia and the trends in it, and the characteristics of the investing countries and the investments themselves. It also summarizes the findings of studies in individual countries of the effects of these investments. The studies of individual countries will be used to try to find some consensus on differences between South-South FDI and North-South FDI. Among the comparisons of the two types of FDI we try to summarize are be findings about their industrial composition, their effects on their host countries and their host-country firms’ productivity, wages, and employment, and how these differ across industries.FDI; East Asia; South-South; Economic development

Foreign Ownership and Employment Growth in Indonesian Manufacturing

Many developing countries would like to increase the share of modern or formal sectors in their employment. One way to accomplish this goal may be to encourage the entrance of foreign firms. They are typically relatively large, with high productivity and good access to foreign markets, and might therefore be better at creating jobs than domestic firms are. However, previous research on the issue has been limited by the paucity of long data sets for firm operations. We examine employment growth in Indonesia in a large panel of plants between 1975 and 2005, and especially in plants taken over by foreign owners from domestic ones. Employment growth is relatively high in foreign-owned establishments, although foreign firms own relatively large domestic plants, which in general grow more slowly than smaller plants. For plants that change the nationality of ownership during our period, we find a strong effect of shifts from domestic to foreign ownership in raising the growth rate of employment, but no significant effects of shifts from foreign to domestic ownership. The faster growth of employment in the foreign-owned plants in general is concentrated in the takeovers, especially in the year of acquisition. Foreign takeover of a domestically-owned plant, on average, brings a large immediate expansion of employment.

Utilization of photon orbital angular momentum in the low-frequency radio domain

We show numerically that vector antenna arrays can generate radio beams which exhibit spin and orbital angular momentum characteristics similar to those of helical Laguerre-Gauss laser beams in paraxial optics. For low frequencies (< 1 GHz), digital techniques can be used to coherently measure the instantaneous, local field vectors and to manipulate them in software. This opens up for new types of experiments that go beyond those currently possible to perform in optics, for information-rich radio physics applications such as radio astronomy, and for novel wireless communication concepts.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Changed title, identical to the paper published in PR

CRY2 Is Associated with Depression

Abnormalities in the circadian clockwork often characterize patients with major depressive and bipolar disorders. Circadian clock genes are targets of interest in these patients. CRY2 is a circadian gene that participates in regulation of the evening oscillator. This is of interest in mood disorders where a lack of switch from evening to morning oscillators has been postulated.We observed a marked diurnal variation in human CRY2 mRNA levels from peripheral blood mononuclear cells and a significant up-regulation (P = 0.020) following one-night total sleep deprivation, a known antidepressant. In depressed bipolar patients, levels of CRY2 mRNA were decreased (P = 0.029) and a complete lack of increase was observed following sleep deprivation. To investigate a possible genetic contribution, we undertook SNP genotyping of the CRY2 gene in two independent population-based samples from Sweden (118 cases and 1011 controls) and Finland (86 cases and 1096 controls). The CRY2 gene was significantly associated with winter depression in both samples (haplotype analysis in Swedish and Finnish samples: OR = 1.8, P = 0.0059 and OR = 1.8, P = 0.00044, respectively).We propose that a CRY2 locus is associated with vulnerability for depression, and that mechanisms of action involve dysregulation of CRY2 expression

Higher productivity in importing German manufacturing firms: self-selection, learning from importing, or both?

This paper uses a newly available comprehensive panel data set for manufacturing enterprises from 2001 to 2005 to document the first empirical results on the relationship between imports and productivity for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for goods. Furthermore, for the first time the direction of causality in this relationship is investigated systematically by testing for self-selection of more productive firms into importing, and for productivity-enhancing effects of imports ('learning-by-importing'). We find a positive link between importing and productivity. From an empirical model with fixed enterprise effects that controls for firm size, industry, and unobservable firm heterogeneity we see that the premia for trading internationally are about the same in West and East Germany. Compared to firms that do not trade at all two-way traders do have the highest premia, followed by firms that only export, while firms that only import have the smallest estimated premia. We find evidence for a positive impact of productivity on importing, pointing to self-selection of more productive enterprises into imports, but no clear evidence for the effect of importing on productivity due to learning-by-importing