The Singapore Economic Review

This paper provides empirical estimates for the impact of R&D on economic growth in Singapore. The Cobb–Douglas based analysis found that R&D investment had a significant impact on total factor productivity performance in the last 20 years and established a long-term equilibrium relationship between R&D investments and TFP. However, compared to OECD countries, the impact of R&D on growth in Singapore is not as strong. To catch up with the developed nations in terms of R&D productivity not only requires increasing R&D intensity in Singapore but also more efficient exploitation of domestic R&D activity.

Marine Parks are established to protect an area of the sea zoned as a sanctuary for the protection of its marine eco-systems, especially coral reef and its associated fauna and flora, like sea grass bed, mangrove and the sea shore. In Malaysia, there are 6 marine parks to-date. The establishment of marine parks also attracts more tourists to the areas. For example, the number of visitors to Payar Marine Park increased tremendously from 3,668 visitors in 1990 to 133,775 visitors in 2002. However, too many tourists are thought by scientists to have damaged the coral reefs. This paper will estimate how much visitors are willing to pay to reduce damages to three marine parks in Malaysia; Payar, Redang and Tioman Marine Park. Willingness to pay estimates were obtained from the visitors using a double-bounded dichotomous choice version of the Contingent Valuation method.

It is shown, using a vintage model of education which is developed in this paper, that given the assumptions of the model, the optimal path of investment in education is to keep the level of investment per student constant and the optimal path of investment in physical capital is to keep the capital-labor ratio constant over time. The pressure to reduce current consumption caused by population ageing is partly mitigated by the fact that a younger population, in the current time, is relatively more efficient in producing utility than an older one, in the future.

This paper examines the effects of uncertainty on an individual's own contribution to the provision of the collective good using an impure public good model. Two types of uncertainty analyzing free-riding behavior are evaluated: (i) uncertainty surrounding the contributions of others to the public characteristic and (ii) uncertainty surrounding the response of others to an individual's own contribution. We extend previous studies by examining both the compensated and uncompensated effects of increases in such risks on the provision of the collective good. We also establish the conditions that are sufficient to determine both compensated and the total, uncompensated effects of an increase in risk on the voluntary provision of the collective good.

The Fisher Effect postulated that real interest rate is constant, and that nominal interest rate and expected inflation move one-for-one together. This paper employs Johansen's method to investigate for the existence of a long-run Fisher effect in the Singapore economy over the period 1976 to 2006, and finds evidence of a positive relationship between nominal interest rate and inflation rate while rejecting the notion of a full Fisher Effect. The dynamic relationship between nominal interest rate and inflation rate is also examined from the error-correction models derived, and the analysis is extended to investigate the impulse response functions of inflation and nominal interest rates where we discover the presence of the Price Puzzle in the Singapore market.

We consider a small open Harris-Todaro (1970) economy with a rural foreign enclave and urban informal sector. We introduce consumption-efficiency relation to explain the simultaneous existence of informal sector and urban unemployment. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of removal of subsidy, given to the foreign enclave, on urban unemployment and on domestic factor income. Our results shed light on the debate: whether subsidies should be removed from the agri-export sector.

This paper examines a wide variety of popular volatility models for stock index return, including Random Walk model, Autoregressive model, Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model, and extensive GARCH model, GARCH-jump model with Normal, and Student t-distribution assumption as well as nonparametric specification test of these models. We fit these models to Dhaka stock return index from 20 November 1999 to 9 October 2004. There has been empirical evidence of volatility clustering, alike to findings in previous studies. Each market contains different GARCH models, which fit well. From the estimation, we find that the volatility of the return and the jump probability were significantly higher after 27 November 2001. The model introducing GARCH jump effect with normal and Student t-distribution assumption can better fit the volatility characteristics. We find that RW-GARCH-t, RW-AGARCH-t RW-IGARCH-t and RW-GARCH-M-t can pass the nonparametric specification test at 5% significance level. It is suggested that these four models can capture the main characteristics of Dhaka stock return index.

This paper investigates whether the upturns and downturns of the US market exert asymmetric influence on the conditional mean and volatility of the Japanese market using the daily returns on stock price indices. Using both the EGARCH and SV models, which simultaneously allow two kinds of asymmetric international transmissions across the markets, the result reconfirms the symmetric transmission in the conditional mean obtained by Bahng and Shin (2003) and the asymmetric transmission in the conditional volatility obtained by Koutmos and Booth (1995) although each of them analyzed only one spillover effect separately. Although the EGARCH and SV models lead to similar results for the spillover effects, the SV model is preferred to the EGARCH model based on Lagrange Multiplier test for the hypothesis of the EGARCH against the SV. The shock to volatility in the US market with the SV model is asymmetrically transmitted to the volatility in the Japanese market.

This article investigates the impact of regional integration on intra-industry trade in manufactures between Thailand and other APEC countries. The study uses pooled cross-sectional and time-series data spanning the period 1980–1999 at a 3-digit Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) level. After accounting for trade imbalance and following Thailand's entry into APEC, intra-industry trade in manufactures between Thailand and countries in Oceania and America decreased, while trade with other Asian countries grew marginally. Results indicate that, in the post APEC era, trade openness stimulated increased intra-industry trade levels with countries in Northeast and Southeast Asia, but decreased trade with countries in America.