Economic integration and job creation in industrial sector

Abstract

Becoming a member of WTO marked an important milestone during the process of economic development recently. Economic integration helped to boot the export and FDI activities.  Although growth in export and FDI activities favored for economic development, they did create little decent jobs for the economy. This paper analyzes the impacts of business operation result, which including export activities, the integration activities and partially the world economic crisis to the job creation in industrial sector. It based on the result of a 200 industial enterprises survey and of statistical data from General Statistic Office. The survey focused on 5 sectors, including garment and textile, leather and shoes, rubber related products, seafood processing and electric and communication industries. They accounted for 48% of industrial labor force in 2009 and had a high level of integration. The paper is organizing as following: the first section presents the real situation of economic activities and job creation, with the observation that growth in employment much lower than that of other economic activities. In the second section, we present the model to examine impacts on economic activities to job creation to answer the question that whether differences in the level of economic activities does influence the job creation capacity. Section three presents our finding, which showed that growth in value-added is important to the development of job creation and some tendency in job creation among the group of enterprises. In addition, it showed that the current structure of economic activities will challenge job creation capacity in the future. The last section is our recommendation for policy maker to change the situation./.