The Singapore Economic Review

The Kyoto Protocol was the outcome of many years of multilateral negotiation and political compromise with the ultimate aim of reducing the risk of dangerous climate change. Unfortunately, most of the countries that ratified the Kyoto Protocol have not taken effective action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, with many Kyoto countries not looking likely to reach their targets. There is also a lack of enthusiasm from major developing countries to take on the binding targets that form the basis of the Kyoto Protocol Approach. This has raised serious doubts about the viability of the Kyoto policy of committing countries to targets and timetables especially as a model for the current negotiations. As the science becomes more compelling that action is needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions, countries are beginning to look for more sustainable alternatives for the period beyond 2012. This paper outlines the key features that are needed in a new climate change framework beyond Kyoto drawing on lessons from monetary history. Using the analogy to the way modern central banks run monetary policy, it outlines an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, which is a system of national climate policies coordinated around a common global price for carbon.

This paper warns the risks of uncritically adopting the mind set of statisticians in empirical analysis. The examples of vector autoregressions, forecast combinations and measurement of treatment effects are used to illustrate the fragility of statistical inference when sample observations are limited.

Recently, there has been increased interest in the distinction between the extensive margin (EM) and the intensive margin (IM) of international trade. Between 1988 and 2006, the growth of the EMs and IMs of Korean exports has been diverse across its destinations. This paper links each component of the trade value (EM, IM, price index and quantity index) to factors that have been identified as trade determinants in the suggested model. This paper finds that the destination GDP, distance, tariffs, language, existence of an export promotion agency (EPA), local infrastructure and import procedures have an effect on the EMs and IMs of Korea's exports, and the effect works largely through the IM. This paper examines the external environment that shapes the contributions of each of these margins of a country's exports.

This paper attempts to establish whether there exists any direct macroeconomic linkages between some East Asian (EA) countries on the one hand and the US on the other hand, based upon quarterly real gross domestic product (GDP) series spanning from the early 1990s. Cointegration, Granger causal relations and contemporaneous correlations of output shocks are explored. Contrary to a priori expectations, the empirical evidence suggests no direct linkages of these economies to the US, with the exception of the Malaysian economy. In the case of Malaysia, only a Granger causal relation from the US is found. All this would allude to the ability of these EA economies save one to grow independently of the US, barring a global economic crisis such as the recent one triggered off by sub-prime loans.

This paper attempts to explore the determinants for small and medium enterprise (SME) performance. In particular, we investigate how training, technology adoption, finance channels and exporting behavior affect SMEs' performance by examining the determinants of the profit per worker. Using a rich and up to date firm-level dataset, we find evidence that SMEs can improve performance by importing more foreign materials inputs and by utilizing foreign technologies from technologically advanced economies. This effect of technology spillover is particularly important for smaller enterprises in developing countries because in-house innovation is expensive. We further find that both informal finance sources and formal finance channels do not enhance the performance of smaller enterprises in financing daily operations and interestingly, informal channels hamper a firm's performance. There is no evidence for the effect of on-the-job training on firm performance. The exporting behavior of firms measured by the percentage of exports has no significant impact on firm performance.

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH), which suggests that returns of a stock market are unpredictable from historical price changes, is satisfied when stock prices are characterized by a random walk (unit root) process. A finding of unit root implies that stock returns cannot be predicted. This paper investigates the stock prices behavior of five ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, for the period from 1990:1 to 2009:1 using a two-regime threshold autoregressive (TAR) approach which allows testing nonlinearity and non-stationarity simultaneously. Among the main findings, our results indicate that stock prices of Malaysia and Thailand are a non-linear series and are characterized by a unit root process, consistent with the EMH. Furthermore, we find that stock prices of Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore follow a non-linear series, however, stock price indices are stationary processes that are inconsistent with the EMH.

We construct a realized volatility measure, using prices of daily West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures and illustrate the robustness of this oil price volatility–macroeconomy relationship under a multivariate co-integrated vector autoregressive (VAR) model. Empirical results suggest that a spike in oil price volatility leads to investments and aggregate output to decline and inflation to rise over the period from 1983Q2 to 2009Q2. Furthermore, the gradual decline of Singapore's oil intensity signals a weakening relationship between oil price and the macroeconomy that supports our empirical findings.

This study explores how income inequality and defence burden affects economic growth in different parts of the world. We follow an endogenous growth model that proposes a negative relationship of growth with income inequality and defence burden. The implications of the model are tested using panel data. The results suggest a negative relationship of growth with income inequality and defence burden. A by-product of this analysis is the conclusion regarding convergence. Our study finds no support for convergence across the world.