Jaan Masso

Home versus Host Country Effects of FDI: Searching for New Evidence of Productivity Spillovers

This paper investigates the effects of both inward and outward foreign direct investment (FDI) on productivity in manufacturing and services sectors. The main novelty is the analysis of the spillover effects of outward FDI that may occur outside the investing firms on the rest of the home country. Our results based on panel data from Estonia do not indicate much spillover effects of outward or inward FDI that are robust to different specifications of the estimated model. There is substantial heterogeneity in the findings on spillovers across different specifications of the model or sector studied.

The Paradox of the Baltic States: Labour Market Flexibility but Protected Workers?

This article assesses the strictness of employment protection legislation and its actual enforcement in the Baltic States. We use information from the applicable legislation as well as employer surveys, data on the coverage of labour legislation and the practice of law enforcement. Overall strictness is close to the average of EU countries and relatively well aligned with EU regulations; individual and collective dismissals are relatively heavily and temporary forms of employment relatively weakly regulated. However, effective flexibility is increased by problems of enforcement: there is much evidence of violations of statutory regulations at enterprise level. In addition, the proportion of the workforce actually covered by the regulations is relatively low. In the Baltic States temporary employment is more widespread, implying a higher level of flexibility than the EU average.

The Link Between Innovation and Productivity in Estonia’s Service Sectors

The emerging literature on the characteristics of innovation processes in the service sector has paid relatively little attention to the links between innovation and productivity. In this paper we investigate how the innovation-productivity relationship differs across various sub-branches of the service sector. For the analysis we use the CDM structural model consisting of equations for innovation expenditures, innovation output, productivity and exports. We use data from the community innovation surveys for Estonia. We show that innovation is associated with increased productivity in the service sector. The results indicate surprisingly that the effect of innovation on productivity is stronger in the less knowledge-intensive service sectors, despite the lower frequency of innovative activities and the results of earlier literature. Non-technological innovation only plays a positive role in some specifications, despite its expected importance especially among the service firms. An additional positive channel of the effects of innovation on productivity may function through increased exports.

The Effect of Outward Foreign Direct Investment on Home-Country Employment in a Low-Cost Transition Economy

The current extensive literature on the home-country employment effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) focuses almost exclusively on investments from high-income and high labor-cost home countries. Our paper analyzes the home-country employment effect in Estonia as a low-cost, medium-income transition economy. The data from the population of Estonian firms between 1995 and 2002 are studied with regression analysis and propensity score matching to construct an appropriate counterfactual for firms that have invested abroad. Our results imply that the logic of the outward investments from low-cost transition and developing economies differs from that of high-income countries. The results indicate that in general, outward FDI positively affects home-country employment growth. Direct investors (domestic firms investing abroad) have a stronger home-country employment effect than do indirect investors (foreign-owned firms investing abroad) due to their smaller preinvestment size and because the subsidiaries of indirect investors are served from other locations rather than from Estonia. The positive employment effect is much stronger for investments made after 1999 due to the better macroeconomic performance of Estonia from 2000 onward. Services firms demonstrate a stronger home-country employment effect than do manufacturing firms.

Labour Markets in the Baltic States During the Crisis 2008-2009: The Effect on Different Labour Market Groups

The economies of the Baltic States have been among the most severely affected by the global economic crisis that started in 2008. This study focuses on the impact of the crisis on the labour markets of the Baltic States with particular emphasis on how the impact varies across different labour market segments. Labour input has been decreased primarily through external adjustment (employment cuts), though part-time employment has emerged as well; wages have been flexible downward throughout the different parts of the economy. Adjustments can be seen both in the private and public sectors (the latter especially in Latvia). At the level of individual companies, quite different adjustment strategies can be seen. Similar to other European countries, males have suffered especially, but also youth and Estonia’s and Latvia’s substantial non-native (Russian-speaking) populations. Wage inequality has somewhat increased and that seems to be primarily due to the increasing premium for education and differences in wage reductions across sectors and firms. During the crisis, expenditures on both passive and active measures have grown significantly, also thanks to the use of EU funds.

Labour Market Flexibility and Migration in the Baltic States: Macro Evidences

The Eastern enlargement of the European Union and the requirements of the European Monetary Union call for increased flexibility of labour markets in both the current EU members and candidate countries. If labour markets and institutions are rigid in the monetary union, market disequilibrium is likely to grow. The present paper aims to give a macroeconomic overview of the Baltic States’ labour market in the period 1995?2001, laying emphasis on the issues of labour market flexibility and labour migration in the context of EU eastward enlargement. The Baltic States comprise a particular regional cluster and an interesting case for making generalizations about the processes of transition and EU eastward enlargement, and developing a new field of economics - the economics of transition and integration. In real terms, one has to admit, the influence of the Baltic economies on the EU eastward enlargement processes can hardly be significant, as the very small size of the Baltic markets bears no comparison with either the markets of the current EU member states (EU15) or the other candidate countries (CC). The Baltic States have dutifully observed the main international standards regulating labour relations in accordance with the EU rules. Comparing the Baltic States’ labour market with those of EU15 and the other candidate countries, one comes to the conclusion that the Baltic States’ labour markets are flexible. The most flexible among them is the Estonian labour market followed by that of Latvia. However, predictably, after joining the EU, the labour markets of the new members may become more rigid due to the increasing influence on them of institutions and trade unions, and due to more generous funding of labour market policies. Moreover, a decline of wage flexibility can be predicted. Free movement of labour as a natural consequence of EU enlargement will also exert pressure on the Baltic labour markets due to the possible migration of better-qualified and flexible labour force, and cross-border movement of labour within the Baltic Sea Region countries. Coupled with ageing of the population, it may increase shortage of skilled labour. Consequently, if labour mobility increases and labour market flexibility declines remarkably during the enlargement processes, market disequilibrium is likely to grow in the Baltic States as well.

Temporary migrants and occupational mobility: evidence from the case of Estonia

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of temporary migration on the upward occupational mobility by using a novel database from Estonia. Design/methodology/approach - – The authors use a unique data set of the online job search portal of Estonia that includes thousands of employees with foreign work experience. The authors study whether the presence of temporary migration in ones working career is associated with upward movement in the occupational ladder, defined either in terms of wages or required human capital. Findings - – The authors did not find any positive effect of temporary migration on upward occupational mobility and in case of females the effect was negative. The results could be related to the short-term nature of migration and the occupational downshifting abroad as well as the functioning of home country labour market. Research limitations/implications - – While the uniqueness of the data set is of value, one needs to acknowledge its weaknesses: the job-seekers work histories are self-reported and the authors do not know what information was left out as undesired by applicant. Practical implications - – The findings imply that the benefits of temporary migration from Eastern to Western Europe on the sending country via the returnees’ labour market performance might be limited, yet it does not exclude the benefits of return migration through other mechanism. Originality/value - – The literature on return migration is not big and there are only a few papers dealing with occupational change or mobility of the return migrants. Compared to earlier studies we have looked at wider set of occupations ranked by different ladders. Using the unique data set the authors have included in the study ca 7,500 return migrants while earlier studies have been based on rather small samples.

Comparing the organization of public research funding in central and eastern European countries

In this article, we present a comparative analysis of the organization of public funding of research in three central and eastern European countries. We first compare the organization of funding agencies, the portfolio of funding instruments and, finally, the repartition of funding by beneficiaries. Further, we identify the main structural characteristics of the funding systems, by looking at features like sectoral divisions, level of delegation and the role of different institutional levels in the management of funding. Against a widespread conception of research policies in central and eastern European countries converging towards a western-style model, our study displays profound differences between the considered countries, related to history but also to contextual factors in the reform phase. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Exporting and Productivity: The Effects of Multi-Market and Multi-Product Export Entry

Most of the empirical studies on the micro-level effects of exporting on productivity pay little attention to the potentially heterogeneous effects of the different modes of export market entry. We study how productivity of firms is affected by export entry simultaneously into several markets or export entry with several export products, and compare these to the entry into fewer markets or the entry with fewer products. Our analysis is based on detailed export data from firms in Estonia, disaggregated for each firm by export markets and individual products. We show that the early stage entry into several export markets or with several products leads to higher growth in productivity, compared with entry into only one foreign market or with only one product. This implies significant benefits from experimentation with different markets and different products.

Foreign Direct Investment and Innovation in Central and Eastern Europe: Evidence from Estonia

A growing literature is trying to analyse the productivity gap between domestic and foreign firms with differences in innovation indicators. In our paper we analyse the relationship between inward and outward FDI at either company or industry level and the innovation behaviour of companies in Estonia. We use company-level data from three waves of the Community Innovation Surveys, which are combined with financial data from the Estonian Business Register and FDI data from the balance of payments statistics. For the analysis we apply a structural model involving equations on innovation expenditure, innovation outcome and productivity, and also innovation accounting and propensity score matching approaches. Our results show that the higher innovation output of foreign owned companies vanishes after various company characteristics are controlled for, but there were significant differences in innovation inputs such as the higher use of knowledge sourcing and the lower importance of various impeding factors. Outward investment has a positive influence on innovativeness among both domestic and foreign owned companies.