Relationships between Average Wages in the Manufacturing Sector and Economic Indicators of the Manufacturing Sector in the Region of Visegrad Group Countries

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for the positive evaluation of our manuscript. Responses to individual points of your review are uploaded in a separate file.

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Reviewer 2 Report

Very happy to review for this manuscript, actually, I must say the authors did a good research here and the paper was organized very well. The methodology adopted here is rational, here are still some little problems which should be taken into consideration and solved before its further process of publication. The suggestions are listed as following:

1. In your title, abbreviation is not suitable for readers to understand it, for instance, when you mention the V4 countries, and the readers or other scholars who come from other regions, they may feel confusing about the V4 countries. Thus, in your title, Visegrad Group is a more suitable expression here.

2. One big problem in the context part of paper, I think it’s the expression of tables, the authors seems to just capture screening-shot, it’s not the suitable method to process the table. I do hope you could utilize Excel to present the data you calculated.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for the positive evaluation of our manuscript. Responses to individual points of your review are uploaded in a separate file.

Please see the attachment.

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Reviewer 3 Report

I find it important to highlight the literature gap that is going to be filled by the study. The introduction part of the study is too short without  mentioning previous studies dealing with the same issue and showing the discrepancies in the current empirical literature. Within the Literature Review I recommend to focus more on studies conducted in the context of Central European countries, not just randomly selected countries. As the period of the study, I recommend to add newer data, i.e. after 2019. At the same time, I find it important to better justify (by refferences to the exact sources) why exactly these indicators were selected as independent variables. As the analysis was performed in the condition of four Central European countries in the period of 2008-2019 it seems that the authors dispose with panel data; hence, panel data analysis would be more appropriate to process the data and derive the results. The tables presented in the result section should be edited and presented in the unified form (i.e. not to present directly the output of the statistical software). It should be presented in more details ( in  the light of the newer studies), what new the study brings. 

Author Response

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Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript. Responses to individual points of your review are uploaded in a separate file.

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Reviewer 4 Report

1. Original Submission

1.1. Recommendation

Rejection

2. Comments to Authors:

Title: Relationship between average wages and the economic indicators of the manufacturing sector in the region of V4 countries

Overview and general recommendation:

Dear authors,

The way the economy evolves in the context of globalization, technological progress, and the requirements to reduce the impact on the environment it is one of the most studied phenomena by contemporary economists. Manufacturing sector in the “New Economy” is still a key factor, but the level of prosperity and economic growth it can creates it depends by the level of technology and innovation incorporated. 

I found this article interesting considering the analyzed region Visegrad Group (V4) countries, but reading the abstract, some phrases started to be confusing. For example, “The selected economic indicators for the period 2008-2019 in relation to average wages were: FDI Flow, GDP, labour productivity, employment, number of hours worked in the manufacturing sector.” It was not clear if it is about average wages in economy or in manufacturing sector. This and other confusions persist further in the article.

Therefore, I recommend the article to be rejected from publication in this format. I explain my concerns in more detail below and I hope it will help the authors to improve it.

Major comments:

·         To be comparable, indicators like GDP and FDI should be measured and used like GDP/capita, not GDP, FDI Flow/capita.

·         Rows 54 – 56 “The research results are shown in the next chapter, which is followed by their critical discussion and setting out the possible political and practical implications and proposals.” It would be better to replace “political” with “policy”.

·         Rows 69 – 71 “However, over the last decades, the share of manufacturing in employment and value added is shrinking at much lower levels of income in comparison with early industrialisers”; recommended … “industrialists” or “manufacturing sector”.

·         Rows 74 – 75 “Thus, in developed economies manufacturing has the ability to drive productivity growth, innovation and trade.” What do you mean “developed economies”? It is about developed countries vs “Developing Countries” or Emerging Market Economy? Please clarify this. Is this paragraph related with the influence of GDP in manufacturing sector to average wages (as it is mentioned in Abstract) in economy or average wages in manufacturing sector? If yes, the paragraph should be reviewed to be clearer that this is about. Similar in the case of the next influencing factor presented: FDI.

·         Rows 111 – 113 “On the other hand, [21] concluded in his research that there is a correlation between FDI and market-size (as measured by per-capita GDP) but indicated that the relation with wages is highly sensitive to small alterations in the conditioning information set.” What do you refer “conditioning information set”?

·         Rows 126 – 127 “On the other hand, the studies (neoclassical theory) [31, 32, 33] have pointed out that higher worker productivity increase wages”. Do you mean general level of wage in economy? If yes, please try to be clearer and more specific.

·         In Literature review section, you need to have more others recent articles regarding the relationship between explanatory variables and dependent variable (average wages in economy and/or manufacturing sector).

·         Reading Literature review section, it is not clear if it is about average wages in economy or average wage in manufacturing sector. Only at the row 228 it became clear that it is about / that the dependent variable is “the level of average wages in the manufacturing sector”. You need to review the Abstract and Introduction sections to be clear from the start what it is about.

·         The phrase 211 – 2017 is too long and unclear. Should be rephrased.

·         Rows 222 - 225 – Are you sure that you mean political implications or policy implications?

·         The hypothesis is not clear and specific enough. You should be more explicit and replace “The examined economic indicators of the manufacturing sector”. Anyway, only now it is clear that it is only about economic indicators regarding manufacturing sector, not economic indicators regarding general economy. From this perspective, the entire article should be reviewed. Also, the title should be modified in order to indicate clearer that it is about average wage in manufacturing sector. The dependent variable in regression model should be renamed accordingly. For example Avg_wage&salar could be Avg_Wag&Salar_Manuf, or something similar. The same in the case of the others variables (independent) used.

·         The independent variables are not presented properly. It is not clear what they measure and how. More than that, as they are presented, FDI and GDP in the manufacturing sector are not comparable as absolute values. To be comparable between countries or regions, they must be divided by population or (in this case) by the number of employees in manufacturing sector. Another way to use these as comparable variables is to use the share of FDI in total investment and the share of GDP in the manufacturing in total GDP in each country, for each year. Maybe you (the authors) did it, but you did not explain enough. You say that the source of the indicators is OECD database, but it is not enough to understand what exactly the indicators measure.

·         It is not clear how you (the authors) have performed the regression model, considering the sample size (4 countries). It should be presented/explained better. The Table no. 1 indicates that there are 41 cases, but it is not clear how, considering that there are four counties and time series for the indicators for 2008 – 2019 period. The way the results of regression are presented in the Table no. 1 could be improved. It is not the proper way for scientific articles.

·         A collinearity diagnosis would be necessary. There is a risk of collinearity between “GDP in manufacturing sector” and Growth of labour productivity in the sector.

·         Rows 486 – 488 “The findings of this study in the manufacturing sector are consistent with the general findings of Stojanova and Trnkova [36], according to which there is a direct relationship between GDP and wages.” Is about GDP in the manufacturing sector or abut total GDP?

·         Row 525 “The political implications…” I am not sure that is about political, but policy (economic policy).

·         If it is possible, I would recommend to the authors to introduce other variables in the model, variables regarding share of technology in manufacturing. For examples: the share of employees in high-technology industry, the share of employees in  medium-high-technology industry, the share of employees in medium-low-technology industry and the share of employee in low-technology industry.  In this way, the study will have more arguments for the phrase (rows 616 – 620): “From the summary of implications and proposals it follows that both the policy makers and the actors of the manufacturing sector themselves should strive to support the use of new technologies, artificial intelligence, automation and robotization, as well as they should support systemic changes and efficient production procedures within the framework of Industry 4.0.”

·         Rows 623 – 626 “All these aspects could have an impact on increasing the GDP of the manufacturing sector and saving in the number of necessary jobs, which, according to this study, could ultimately result in an increase in average wages in the sector.” Does the study prove this or that there is a negative relationship between the level of employee in manufacturing sector and the average wage in manufacturing sector?

·         Recommendation: if possible, run panel data analysis, more exactly ordinary least squares panel data linear regression.

·         Other recommendation: Improve the way you (the authors) express in English; the words and expressions used could be replaced with others (more proper) and the phrases could be shorter and clearer. It would be useful that a native English language speaker would help you.

 Best regards

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript. Responses to individual points of your review are uploaded in a separate file.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors improved the paper significantly. However, I would still recommend to perform some minor improvements. There are several errors in English spelling. With regard to the period of data used, I understand the reasons why it is difficult to add more recent data. However, I recommend to add the reasons into the paper, similarly as it is justified in the cover letter provided by the authors. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript. Responses to individual points of your review are uploaded in a separate file.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

I appreciate your effort to improve the article according with the recommendations. The new version is much better than the first one and I think this is also useful for you too. I have only few recommendations for you:

·        If it is possible, it would be useful to rephrase the hypothesis to underline the positive and negative relationships between explanatory variables and dependent variable (as it is obvious in the function of the regression model where it is clear what you estimate – f 1, rows 393 - 397).

·        In all the tables with the results of the regressions, p-values or sig. should be written accordingly: 0.000 or 0.023.  It is not proper to use/write 1,31995E-08.

·        professional language proofreading is still necessary.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript. Responses to individual points of your review are uploaded in a separate file.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf