The significance of standard, patent and labour on import value: case study in Indonesia

Abstract

Being a never-ending debate, the direction of developing standards has to be in the opposite direction in facilitating international trade. This study investigated the relationship of standard, patent, and labor on Indonesian import. This study found some differences and very diverse correlations between the components in the second factor, both positively and negatively correlated. Those studies are generally carried out by developed countries, where the infrastructure to support innovation and standards has developed rapidly. The analysis of this research was carried out using panel data regression and the Cobb-Douglas function. Estimation was carried out using the fix effect and the random effect models. The robust model found variables that impact Indonesian import performance, both simultaneous and partial tests. In addition, a significant impact of the contribution of national standards on the growth of import value and sectors was determined. The low growth rate of patents for the same sector shows the innovation sectors that contributed less to the import value when observed more deeply. In contrast to national standards tending to be domestic, the growth standard of a sector will be inversely proportional to the growth in the value of imports in that sector, except for sectors whose conformity assessment does not support infrastructure. Besides, this study found that labor had no significant impact on import value. However, there was a significant potential from developing national standards and adopting international standards for the growth of national import performance in Indonesia. In addition to functioning as an empirical investigation of the effect of the growth of national standards, the adoption of international standards, labor, and patents on the growth of import value, it also looks at the contribution to the knowledge of developing countries' import growth factors, especially those related to standardization. The analysis shows that national standard growth and adoption growth differently contribute to Indonesian import performance. The findings show that the two factors in standard development have different functions in import performance. This paper further contributed to the knowledge of import growth factors of a developing country, particularly those related to standardization.