Spillover effect of foreign direct investment on wage-inequality in Indian manufacturing industries

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study the spillover effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on skilled–unskilled wage inequality in the Indian manufacturing industries.Design/methodology/approachThe authors show theoretically with a model of spillover that if foreign firms (receiving FDI) have a negative spillover effect on domestic firms (not receiving FDI), then the level of capital and skilled workers in the domestic firms falls down. Consequently, the authors conduct an empirical analysis by using system GMM estimation technique on the firm-level data of the Indian organised manufacturing sector.FindingsThe authors show that wage inequality worsens when there is negative spillover effects like competition spillover or skill spillover effect of FDI in India.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to measure the various spillover effects of FDI on the wage inequality in the Indian manufacturing industries by using firm-level data.