The Effects of Exports on Employment in Korean Manufacturing : An Industry-Level Analysis

This article begins with the question of what is the main reason why export growth does not lead to sufficient job creation, and examines the relationship between exports and employment from various perspectives. We applied the growth accounting method to decompose the changes in employment induced by exports into the scale and composition effects on employment, so that it captures the employment effect caused by the changes in the composition of export products. From this analysis, it can be seen that the reduction in the employment effect of exports is highly correlated with the changes in the composition of the export products toward less labor-intensive. From the empirical analysis using industry-level data, it is confirmed that the higher the capital intensity, the lower the export elasticity of employment. Another interesting founding is that the export elasticity of employment is higher when the export proportion of SMEs (or final consumption goods) is larger