Estimation result of the Mincer-type wage functionThe estimation of the Mincer-type wage function indicates that there is clearly a wage disparity due to the presence or absence of exports concerning wages. This result differs from previous domestic and overseas research including Schank et al. (2007), Munch and Skaksen (2008), Tanaka (2015), and Endo (2016).
However, unlike previous research, in my paper I do not use panel data of workers due to restrictions on data and cannot exclude the possibility that differences in the unobservable workers’ abilities and plant characteristics are affected. For this reason, I also estimated the wage function by plant size because the same scale plants are expected to have small differences in characteristics that cannot be observed. The result shows that, at plants with 300 or fewer employees and firms with 299 or less employees, the impact of export on wage disparity is remarkable.
Additionally, in order to compare the relative degree of influence of the part correlating purely with export among the export premieres of wages, we performed Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition on 2012 data. The impact of exports was 9.5% for the entire manufacturing industry, less than 10%, but for plants with 100 or fewer employees, it is over 1/3. Even for plants with 101 to 200 employees, it is 20%, accounting for a relatively large weight (Table 1).
Table 1 Pure effect of exports on wage premiums of exporting plants
Mechanism behind the big influence of export on wages of small firmsWhy did exports bring wage disparity only to smaller plants and firms? Two mechanisms are conceivable.
One is rent sharing, as Helpman et al. (2010) suggested. In general, smaller scale businesses tend to have lower performance. Among such firms, starting exports will greatly improve the performance compared with other firms, and this will be reflected in wages. In contrast, in large-scale firms, non-exporting firms can also afford to raise wages due to other achievements rather than exporting and, as a result, the wage disparity between exporting and non-exporting firms is not clear.
The other is a mechanism that raises wages as a result of training and/or recruiting employees for starting to export. Generally, small and medium-sized firms are not sufficiently structured to develop human resources such as in-house training, compared with large firms. If such firms decide to start exporting, they need to recruit personnel who can conduct export business urgently and pay higher wages for new employees or employees with such ability. Consequently, the wage disparity between exporting and non-exporting firms grows. In contrast, large firms in general are actively engaged in human resource development regardless of whether or not they export, and when non-exporting firms start to export, there is no need to additionally hire and train human resources by raising wages.
ConclusionIn Ito (2017), I reveal that exports and wages clearly are correlated in Japan’s manufacturing sector, especially for smaller-scale plants and firms. Thus, should Japan adopt an anti-liberalisation policy such as tariff increases to protect widening wage inequality?
In reality, raising tariffs is not a substantial solution. Milanovic and Squire (2007) indicate that tariff reduction has a limited relationship of tariff reduction and wage inequality between skills and industries. Tariff cuts also have the effect of raising industry-level labour productivity of the industry where tariffs are lowered by reducing employees mainly in less productive firms (Trefler, 2004, LaRochelle-Côté, 2007). The best way for Japan is to seek further trade liberalisation. For wage inequality, the effective policy is to take care of less productive firms by helping them improve productivity or exiting from the market smoothly, although modest efforts are needed.
Editors’ note: The main research on which this column is based first appeared as a Discussion Paper of the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) of Japan.
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