Three essays on Vietnamese Economy

• Main Authors: Chung-Yueh Chiu, 邱忠岳
• Other Authors: Chih-Hai Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/tm9e6v

博士 === 國立中央大學 === 經濟學系 === 105 === This dissertation exploits comprehensive level datasets across two Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia and Vietnam) and China to analyze three issues regarding foreign direct investment (FDI) and other related economic issues. We aim to clarify these issues as follows: (1) Birds of a Feather Flock Together? The location Choice of Multinational and Local Firms in Vietnam; (2) Aggregate Productivity Growth analysis in Vietnam after Ownership Deregulation; (3) A Meta-frontier Approach: Technological Catching-up between ASEAN members and China. In first essay, we use the General Statistical Office (GSO) data from 2000 to 2005 in Vietnam, analyzing whether foreign and local newcomers are clustering when selecting entry location. That is, foreign newcomers (local newcomers), choose more existing foreign (local) firms in an area to invest. Furthermore, considering the clusters of foreign and local firms in neighboring areas may influence the regional selection of new entrants, this chapter also analyzes the location choice with spatial aspect. The empirical results show that both foreign and local entrants prefer to invest in a region where the more foreign firms are located, and a cluster of local firms decrease the likelihood of both foreign and local entrants to set up plants in that province. On the other hand, the more existing foreign firms (local firms) in a given region may have a positively complementary (negatively competitive) effect on local entrants’ entering in their neighboring areas. The second essay applies the aggregate productivity growth (APG) approach against the background of the preceding essay. As the data permits, we use Vietnam’s firm-level dataset from 2000 to 2008 to analyze APG. The empirical results show that the average APG in Vietnam rose by 6.80% with the largest contribution to the reallocation of resources between 2000 and 2008, which indicated Vietnam is still in the development stage of resource dividend. In terms of technical efficiency, its modest growth contributed an average APG of 2.2%, accounting for about a third of the average growth rate. In addition, if the data was classified as foreign, local and state-owned manufacturing, the results show that local firms' APG and technological growth are the lowest compared to foreign and state firms. In the final part of the chapter, by distinguishing dataset into provinces, it is found that Vietnam's APG concentrated in specific areas and these inequalities may lead to imbalanced distribution of outcome between provinces. The final essay explores the dynamic productivity gap between China, Vietnam and Indonesia to check whether there does catch-up exist. This essay uses China, Vietnam and Indonesia’s firm-level dataset from 2000 to 2007 for analysis. The empirical results show that, under the common resource boundary, Indonesia's textile and electronics’ technical efficiency are relative behind China; similarly, Vietnam textile and electronics’ technical efficiency also showed relatively backward results. As China actively joined the Asian market and devoted more R&D, which widened the gap of productivity to catch up with China, reflecting that Indonesia and Vietnam were struggling to catch up with China. In the final of the chapter, we also made a regression analysis. The regression results found that there are uncertain effects on the cluster of foreign firms to help firms catch up with China's productivity, and the cluster of essential high-efficiency firms in the same region has positive effect to help firms to catch up with China's productivity.