PUBLICATIONS & REPORTS

Contents Introduction

Foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) have accounted for important shares of employment and production in Indonesian manufacturing since 1975 and these shares increased especially rapidly in the early- to mid-1990s. These increases were concentrated in the machinery industries and MNCs with large foreign ownership shares, and continued through and after the crisis of 1997-1998, despite apparently large withdrawals inward FDI in 1998 and subsequent years. MNCs generally had much higher average labor productivity than local plants and these differentials persisted after accounting for plant-wise variation in electricity consumption per employee, size, and vintage in about three-fourths of the cases examined. However, there was also large variation in MNC presence and productivity differentials across industries and time, with statistically insignificant differentials most common in apparel and footwear, as well as in MNCs with small foreign-ownership shares.