Exporting Sweatshops? Evidence from Myanmar

This paper is the first chapter of my PhD dissertation at Stanford University. I am grateful to Toshihiro Kudo and IDE-JETRO for sharing their data on the Myanmar garment industry. The paper benefited from advice from Nick Bloom, Dave Donaldson, Pascaline Dupas, Kalina Manova, and Yoichi Sugita. I am also grateful for the comments from the editor, Amit Khandelwal; three anonymous referees; and participants of the seminars and conferences at which I presented the draft paper. I also thank the staff of the Myanmar research company who helped with field data collection and all the firm managers in Myanmar who took time out to respond to our interviews. Financial support was provided by the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Countries, Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries, the Stanford Center for International Development, the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Contemporary Asia Fellowship), the SIEPR Ely Graduate Student Fellowship, and the JSPS KAKENHI grant number JP17K13722.

A supplemental appendix is available online at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.1162/rest_a_00827.