Multinational Enterprises and Vietnam’s Exports: Comparing Economy-wide and Firm-level Evidence

Eric Ramstetter () and Kien Nguyen

No 2016-22, AGI Working Paper Series from Asian Growth Research Institute

Abstract: This paper examines the role of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) have played in Vietnam’s exports in 1995-2014. Economy-wide estimates suggest MNE share of Vietnam’s export grew from about one quarter to about two-thirds during this period. MNE shares of GDP were much smaller (6 to 18 percent); correspondingly export-production ratios were much (4.7 to 9.6 times) higher in MNEs than in the non-MNEs sector. If comparisons are limited to formal enterprises, wholly-foreign MNEs (WFs), which account for the vast majority of MNEs in Vietnam, tend to have relatively high export propensities and account for the vast majority of MNE exports. These data thus suggest that MNEs, and particularly WFs, make unusually large direct contributions to exports in Vietnam compared to other economic activities. On the other hand, these compilations cannot establish if export propensities differ significantly among ownership groups after accounting for other, related firm-level and industry-level characteristics. Most importantly, this paper highlights several substantial problems revealed by compilations of the firm-data which much be addressed before more reliable, rigorous analysis of the firm-level data will be possible.

Keywords: Multinational enterprises; state-owned enterprises; ownership; exports (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F23 L33 L60 L81 O53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-int and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://id.nii.ac.jp/1270/00000119/ (text/html)
https://agi.repo.nii.ac.jp/?action=repository_acti ... bute_id=22&file_no=1 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:agi:wpaper:00000119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in AGI Working Paper Series from Asian Growth Research Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kazuki Tamura ().