• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.133-151
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• 2021

Purpose - This study examines the effects of expatriate transfer on foreign affiliate's labor productivity. Design/methodology - Using Korean-owned foreign affiliate-level data, we estimate the effect of expatriate transfer on foreign affiliate's labor productivity using the system generalized method of moments model. We also consider foreign affiliate- and host country-specific contingencies and test how they are associated with expatriates in enhancing foreign affiliate's labor productivity. Findings - We consider foreign production intensity and cultural distance between the home (i.e., South Korea) and host countries as key contingencies that influence the effect of expatriates on foreign affiliate's labor productivity. We find that expatriates are effective in enhancing the labor productivity of less production-intensive foreign affiliates. This effect is strengthened as expatriates are deployed to countries that share cultural similarities with the home country. Originality/value - Considering that previous studies provide mixed results on the effect of expatriates, our findings suggest that foreign affiliate-specific operational orientation and cultural distance should be considered jointly to understand the true effect of expatriate staffing on foreign affiliate performance.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.366-375
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• 2016

This study aims to investigate the impact of total, native-born, and foreign-born employment rates on the increases of GDP and per capita GDP for 24 OECD countries out of 34 countries depending on data availability. The panel data analysis is formed by a fixed-effects model which allows dummy variable in it to permit the intercept term to vary over time-series and cross-sectional units. Empirical evidences obtained by simple and multiple panel regressions reveal that the contribution to increasing of GDP by foreign-born employment is obviously lower than the one by native-born employment. And, native-born labor is substituted by foreign-born labor. It also has to be mentioned that the labor is playing a key role in increasing in national income. And, therefore, labor-related policy should be concerned on decreasing in labor productivity and segmentation of labor market resulted from inflow of foreign labor. It means that labor-related policy has to take care of not only the magnitude, but also the quality of foreign-born labor.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.289-306
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• 2021

This paper aims to investigate how and to what extent FDI impacts the relative demand for skilled labor within firms in the case of developing countries. The analysis uses a sizeable micro-level dataset for Malaysian manufacturing industries using the System-GMM estimators to control the estimations' endogeneity problems. For this purpose, the study uses foreign equity share at the firm level to investigate foreign ownership effects at the firm level and the Horizontal FDI index by Smarzynska Javorcik (2004) to analyze FDI intra-industry linkages influence on the structure of labor demand for Malaysian domestic firms. Our findings indicate that foreign ownership increases the skilled demand within Malaysian manufacturing through the learning process, exclusively for small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs). Conversely for foreign-owned firms, changes in their skilled-labor share do not associate with changes in firm-level foreign equity share. We conclude that foreign ownership per se is not the major contributing factor for skill upgrading in Malaysian manufacturing firms. Furthermore, the competitive pressures caused by foreign firms' presence within the same industry - namely horizontal FDI - has a significant negative spillover effect on the level of skilled-labor share for domestic firms in the Malaysian manufacturing sector within periods of the understudies.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.115-130
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• 2019

Purpose - This paper examines the impact of labor market regulations on FDI and the production of foreign firms. Design/methodology - We use an index of employment protection along with data on the FDI and production of foreign affiliates that are provided by the OECD. Findings - The empirical results show that strict employment protection discourages both the production and initial entry of foreign firms, with its impact on production being larger than that on the initial entry decision. The result is robust to various specifications in which instrumental variable estimations are used by applying a unionization rate and a severance pay for redundancy dismissal as instruments, respectively. Therefore, policymakers should not limit their focus to tax incentives, cash grants, and relaxation of market regulations, but they should also extend their attention to labor market deregulation and decreasing non-wage cost to attract more foreign firms into their countries. Originality/value - This paper attempts to answer the question on the impact of employment protection rules on the foreign firm's decisions regarding production as well as initial entry.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.75-84
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• 2010

Recently, foreign labor standards accreditation system has been emerged as more firms outsource manufacturing works to global vendors focused manufacturing. This paper discuss and compare three major private labor accreditation systems and evaluate what kind of problems may emerge if they become the major global standards for labor practices. This paper concludes that private labor standards accreditation system needs more transparency in the process and should improve accountability by including other stakeholders in the process.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Building Construction
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• v.5 no.1 s.15
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• pp.75-79
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• 2005

The Korean society faces a new issue of accepting foreign workers. Foreign labors in construction industry reached about 400,000 recently. Thus they have become one of the essential resources to fill up insufficient labor supplies in construction industry. And it is important how to manage foreign labors efficiently. However there are few studies focused on this subject. Purpose of this study is to research productivity of foreign labors in the domestic construction site. So investigate the value of foreign labors. Also this study forecast elements effect on foreign labors productivity in the construction industry. And research what element is more important to improve productivity and what element is more difficult to manage. In the result, this study is expected to prospect effective method of foreign labor's management in the domestic construction industry, so contribute to utilize foreign labors more efficiently.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.675-684
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• 2021

This paper aims to analyze factors influencing earnings of workers in Vietnam using provincial-level data from 2016 to 2018. We show the important determinants of earnings of workers of more than 15 years old including working hour, labor force, life expectancy, education, regulation measured by Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) and especially Industry 4.0, our major depart from literature proxies by government expenditure on science and technology, number of phone lines, and number of internet users. Working hours are a typical measurement of quantity of labor supplied. Labor force represents market size from the supply side. Life expectancy measures the health of laborers, a physical quality measure of workers. PCI stands for institutional status of the locality. Two most important factors of our interest are education, representing qualification of workers, and Industry 4.0, reflecting the new working environment of workers. By estimating a robust standard error fixed-effect model, we have evidence that all factors are significant in explaining earnings of Vietnamese workers. Education and IR4.0 play an important role in earnings of workers of Vietnam. Results also provide an estimation of Vietnam's labor supply in the context of Industry 4.0. In addition, findings contribute to explain the income discrepancy among Vietnamese provinces.

• East Asian Economic Review
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.275-301
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• 2020

We analyze state-level matching efficiencies in the Indian labor market using stochastic frontier analysis. The key contribution of this research is the estimation of matching efficiencies at the state level because these can be used for a state-level measure of labor market conditions. Next, we explore the relationship between the estimated matching efficiencies and population density, labor market flexibility, and the Ease of Doing Business index, respectively. The results show that matching efficiency is heterogeneous across states with considerable variation in accordance with the regional diversity in India. However, we find that there is little relationship between the estimated matching efficiencies and the labor market conditions of interest, suggesting that other regional diversity affects matching efficiencies across states in India.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.39-47
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• 2017

Purpose - This study investigated xenophobia that has been a serious social problem, and classified multi-cultural groups in Korea into married immigrant, foreign labor workers and foreign students studying in Korea to examine the effects of fixed idea on multi-cultural persons, multi-cultural education experience, multi-cultural sensitivity, good feeling on multi-cultural persons upon social distance with multi-cultural persons, and to find out counteractions and cultural capacity on the xenophobia. Research design, data, and methodology - The study classified multi-cultural persons into married women immigrant, foreign labor worker, and foreign students studying in Korea to examine the effects of their thoughts on cultural cognition. Self-administered questionnaire was used. The subject was college students in Gyeonggi, Gyeongnam and Chungcheong with industrial complexes, more married women immigrants and more foreign students studying in Korea. Results - As shown in the findings, Korean people had different emotion and preference on married immigrant or foreign students studying in Korea and foreign labor workers. Conclusions - This study investigated the effect of multi-cultural person's cultural distance upon xenophobia. Different preference to multi-cultural persons depending upon fixed idea might produce xenophobia, so that the government was demanded to establish various kinds of policies of lives to live life together with immigrant at government level.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.555-561
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• 2015

The construction industry is a labor-oriented and quality, cost, and schedule performance is effected by technicians. However, the construction industry have faced a labor shortage problem. Therefore, technician graying and no new workers inflow cause labor shortage and decline of worker's skill level. The utilization of foreign technicians instead of domestic technicians has been increased in the construction industry. This paper performed questionnaire survey for 43 managers on 14 project fields to determine the current status and problems of construction technicians and to propose a improvement plan. As a result, most foreign technicians are carpenters and iron workers, but the skill levels are generally lower than domestics. The major problems for foreign technicians are communication and non-skilled. Then, labor productivity and accident rates of foreign technicians are higher than domestics. This paper proposes that skill training programs, language lessons, and multi-cultural programs are effective to improve foreign workers' problems.