Does Foreign Direct Investment Promote Skill Upgrading in Developing Countries? Empirical Evidence from Malaysia

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 intraindustry 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.