Dutch disease resistance: Evidence from Indonesian firms

Abstract

Oil and gas windfalls may lead to the Dutch disease, that is, the crowding out of the manufacturing sector due to rising wages when labor is drawn to the expanding sectors. In this paper, we exploit the fact that oil and gas discoveries contain an element of luck as well as oil price fluctuations to capture exogenous variation in oil and gas windfalls across Indonesia and identify their effects on manufacturing firms. We find that oil and gas windfalls on average cause wages as well as firms’ labor productivity, output, and employment to increase, while product unit values and exit rates are unaffected. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the least productive firms are more likely to exit, and surviving low-productivity firms see relatively large expansions in output and labor productivity, while high-productivity firms see relatively high expansions in employment.