Labor productivity in the Garment Industry : Evidence from Laos

ISBN-13: 9786139418886 / Angielski

Bounmy Inthakesone

Opis

This paper investigated the factors influencing labor productivity in the garment industry in Lao PDR. This study's emphasis was on a firm's characteristics: labor quality, gender, age, and ownership, using a firms' balanced panel data from 2004 to 2006 in Vientiane Capital. In order to investigate these factors, only export firms were used and the Cobb-Douglas production function was employed to obtain the results. At that time, the garment industry is relatively new in Lao PDR, there is a limited amount of published data. The data set for this analysis consists of 38 firms over a period of 3 years (2004-2006), totally it has 114 observations. There are 20 foreign firms among 38 firms in each year. The results show that an increase in 1 percent of the variable labor quality leads to an increase in a firms' labor productivity 3.33 percent. This indicates that a firm with a large stock of educated or experienced workers will be more productive than a firm with fewer of these workers. Based on the empirical results of this analysis, it is suggested that labor quality is the most influential factor promoting a firm's labor productivity in the garment industry in Lao PDR.

O autorze

Inthakesone, Bounmy
Ph.D. from South Korea. More than 18 years of teaching. Director of Research Division, Faculty of Economics and Business Management, National University of Laos. I've conducted researches in various fields and worked at Impact Evaluation Lab/Learning Network, KDI, South Korea. I am a national expert on social economic of Wetland Inventory project.