IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/isu/genstf/201411210800001010.html

Mandatory costs by firm size thresholds: firm location, growth and death in Sri Lanka

Author

Listed:
  • Abidoye, Babatunde O.
  • Orazem, Peter
  • Vodopivec, Milan

Abstract

Sri Lanka's Termination of Employment of Workmen Act (TEWA) requires that firms with 15 or more workers justify layoffs and provide generous severance pay to displaced workers, with smaller firms being exempted. Although formally subject to TEWA, firms in Export Promotion Zones (EPZs) do not face the same constraints as nonEPZ firms due to size incentives and lax labor law enforcement in that sector. In EPZ, 77% of firms have more than 15 employeses while 76% of nonEPZ firms are smaller than 15 employees. Panel data on all formal sector firms between 1995 and 2003 shows that 80% of the size gap is from sorting of large firms into the EPZ. In addition, EPZ firms grow faster and are less likely to die than comparably sized nonEPZ firms. Despite its intent, TEWA lowered employment.

Suggested Citation

  • Abidoye, Babatunde O. & Orazem, Peter & Vodopivec, Milan, 2014. "Mandatory costs by firm size thresholds: firm location, growth and death in Sri Lanka," ISU General Staff Papers 201411210800001010, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:isu:genstf:201411210800001010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/770fe7a4-725f-4b8e-b589-360f58f1d920/content
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ragui Assaad & Caroline Krafft & Shaimaa Yassin, 2020. "Job creation or labor absorption? An analysis of private sector job growth in Egypt," Middle East Development Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(2), pages 177-207, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:isu:genstf:201411210800001010. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Curtis Balmer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiasus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.