International labor migration in Vietnam and the impact of receiving countries' policies

Labor export has been part of Vietnam’s socio-economic development strategy since the beginning of the doi moi era. Recent years, Vietnam has sent about 80,000 workers abroad per year. Vietnam has become a major source country of unskilled foreign workers for high-income East Asian countries. However, in these receiving countries, the desertion rate among Vietnamese workers is quite high, compared with that for workers from other countries. This paper examines the impact of Korean and Japanese policies for receiving foreign workers applied to and implemented in Vietnam, as well as the impact of Vietnamese labor sending system, on the problem of runaway workers.

Temporary jobs and globalization

Deregulation of the use of temporary workers in 2004 (the Worker Dispatching Act of 2004) has been regarded as an important reason for the recent rise of temporary workers in Japan. However, the shift from permanent to temporary workers began long before. This paper empirically explores links between the shift from permanent to temporary workers in the Japanese manufacturing sector and economic globalization, using industry-level data. We find that outsourcing is positively correlated with the replacement of permanent workers with temporary workers in domestic production. In addition, we find that industries losing world share of value added tend to decrease the employment of permanent workers. Industries with higher exports or imports are aggressive in using temporary workers, which suggests the role of temporary workers as an employment buffer.