The experiment was conducted in Yangon, Myanmar. With a population of over 6 million, Yangon is the cultural, commercial, and financial capital of Myanmar, home to over 90% of all registered businesses, and thus accounts for a vast majority of private sector jobs. When it comes to examining how returning skilled migrants can potentially close the skills gap and strengthen a local labor market in a developing country, Myanmar offers an excellent case study due to its unique economic and political history. Since its independence from Great Britain in 1948, Myanmar was ruled by three consecutive military regimes until 2015 when the first democratically elected civilian government came to office in the country’s history. During decades of military rule, crackdowns on students, political oppression, and severe economic hardships triggered a departure of the skilled and talented to other countries in search of better economic opportunities. Meanwhile, absent meaningful educational reforms, the country’s higher education system was unable to produce graduates equipped with the skills employers needed. Although no official statistics are available, anecdotal evidence suggests that a large number of Burmese migrants work as engineers, skilled laborers, surveyors, IT analysts, and nurses in more advanced countries (relative to Myanmar) such as Singapore and Malaysia. Many of these migrants have worked for international firms and accumulated skills consistent with global standards. Thus, they could be a potential source of skills for employers in Myanmar if programs and policies designed to attract them to return home can be put in place.Footnote 3 The historical context and current political climate of Myanmar provide a unique opportunity to explore how return migrants fare in the labor market, which will generate policy implications specific to Myanmar but also applicable to other developing countries facing shortages of sufficiently skilled workers.
Preparation of resumes began with sampling job openings and collecting job requirements from job advertisements each week. I then prepared resumes meeting those requirements in terms of educational attainment, years of work experience, salary requirement, and relevant computer skills. For each job posting, I prepared two resumes, and for each resume, I randomized the following variables: (1) country where an applicant accumulated labor market experience (local/foreign) and (2) foreign country (Singapore/Malaysia) conditional on being assigned foreign experience. The choice of Singapore and Malaysia labor markets in this application is meant to reflect the actual situation that most skilled Burmese migrants work in these countries. In addition, the characteristics of the Singapore and Malaysia labor markets are fundamentally similar to those of Myanmar. For instance, although workers are allowed to form unions in these three Southeast Asian countries, their collective political clout is relatively limited and labor rights are significantly curtailed, compared with those found in liberal democracies in western countries; protests by workers are rarely tolerated and often suppressed immediately. Thus, we can rule out Myanmar employers’ concern that returnees who have been exposed to the Singapore and Malaysia labor markets might demand excessive political rights and stage protests.
If an applicant had foreign experience, this information was salient to employers in the subject line of the emails sent to employers by listing “[Position applying for]: Applicant with work experience in Singapore/Malaysia,” as well as in the content of the application letter by listing “I had relevant work experience in Singapore/Malaysia.” In addition, foreign experience is also salient in the resume by listing an applicant’s last three foreign employers and their foreign addresses. Each resume listed the job title, period of employment, and company name of an applicant’s recent three jobs in reverse chronological order. The total years of work experience listed in the resume were always the same for both applicants and met the job requirements. Each resume was randomly assigned three companies where the applicant previously worked from a list of companies that were carefully chosen from two company registries based on two criteria: they (1) are of small size (most employing less than 20 persons) and (2) lack reputation and recognition at the national and international levels. This effectively rules out the possibility that potential employers might infer labor productivity from previous employments and their prior belief about the quality of previous experience.Footnote 4 Both applicants were unemployed and looking for employment. Similarly, age of applicant, year of graduation, college major, university, computer skills, and other related skills were the same for both resumes. One of the resumes was randomly assigned a female name and the other a male name. For job openings with gender restriction, both resumes were assigned the same gender. Gender requirement for a job opening was always mentioned in the advertisement. Name of an applicant was always listed at the top of the resume with a large font size. Address and contact information were listed below the name. The resumes themselves were designed based on a large pool of actual resumes used by applicants in the Myanmar market and thus representative of actual job seekers. A pair of resume samples prepared for a site engineer position is provided in Additional file 1, with resume sample 1 belonging to an applicant with Malaysia experience and resume sample 2 belonging to a local experience. While each employer was sent two resumes, they were sent at least a day apart. Each resume was randomly assigned a template and a cover letter. The font and layout choices were also randomized. Because the number of features randomized by the experiment was large, it was unlikely that the resumes would have similarly listed characteristics to describe the applicants. Furthermore, different fonts and layouts were used for each resume sent to an employer. Thus, it is very likely that employers viewed each resume as coming from an independent and real applicant.
Finally, resumes were saved as word files and randomly submitted via emails (independent of any resume characteristics) to employers over a 2-day period (Wednesday to Thursday) in each of the 19 weeks between March 23, 2015, and August 7, 2015. Unsuccessful applications due to incorrect employers’ email addresses, which constitute less than 1% of the sample, were dropped from the sample.
The sample for job openings is from a popular magazine among job seekers in Myanmar (Opportunity; http://www.opportunity.com.mm/). The magazine carries only job advertisements, is published weekly, and accounts for approximately 90% of all job advertisements in the country. Job openings are classified by industrial sector: (1) production and manufacturing, (2) construction, (3) tourism, (4) IT, (5) trading, (6) service, and (7) non-government organizations (NGO) and international non-government organizations (INGO). I restrict the sample to (1) skills-intensive and professional job categories; (2) job openings that require applicants to submit resumes via email; and (3) non-NGO and non-INGO jobs. I also restrict the sample to one randomly selected job opening per employer although several employers list multiple job openings in a given week. Each company is uniquely identified by a combination of information available in the advertisements, including company name, address, phone number, and email; I use this information to ensure that each company is sampled only once in the event that a company’s job advertisements show up in several issues of the Opportunity magazine during the study period.
Only the occupations of software developer and programmer, accountant, and engineer are chosen for this study because they represent growing occupations as Myanmar has been trying to move from an agriculture-based economy toward a service-, manufacturing-, and production-based economy. An examination of the Opportunity magazine reveals they account for more than 80% of all professional and technical job openings in a typical week. A close investigation of all job advertisements also reveals no systematic differences in job openings between foreign and local companies in terms of qualification, job title, and advertisement content. In addition, job titles within each occupation group tend to be homogeneous. For instance, job titles for most accounting jobs are either accountant or senior accountant. Myanmar has seen a gradual increase in the inflow of foreign direct investment since 2011 when it opened up, resulting in an increased number of foreign companies and multinational corporations operating in Myanmar.Footnote 5, Footnote 6 Further, as the Myanmar economy is projected to grow at an annual rate of approximately 8% in the coming years, according to the World Bank,Footnote 7 a shortage of workers with sufficient skills among these occupation groups will be an issue for both local and foreign employers in the coming years. The distribution of sample job openings, broken down by occupations, is provided in Appendix 1. Broadly, 46% of them can be grouped as accountant, 39% as engineer, and 14% as software developer or programmer.