The Singapore Economic Review

This paper examines the effects of market demand, labor productivity, socio-economic development and provision of industrial estates on foreign direct investment (FDI) across 13 states and 1 federal territory in Malaysia. The analysis uses FDI data of the manufacturing sector and data on independent variables for the years 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. Results indicate positive relationships between these factors and FDI inflows in the manufacturing sector. FDI inflows are found to be most sensitive to labor productivity and GDP. The significance of socio-economic development for FDI is viewed in a long-term perspective.

Contract manufacturing is the catalyst shaping the world economy under globalization. Affirming the dominance of the open network in organizing worldwide value chains, it transformed Japan and US into trade partners rather than rivals. It allows firms like Apple, Nokia and Sony to outsource production tasks to People's Republic of China, which serves as the world's workplace, and provides a niche for Singapore and Taiwan in late industrialization. Tapping into the economy of scope from the pooling of capacity and information, contract manufacturers like Foxconn and Flextronics provide durable and significant benefit for their economies of domicile, hence a novel niche in late industrialization.

This paper determines whether adopting the basket-peg rather than the floating regime is optimal for emerging market countries. Under the basket-peg regime, there is a trade-off between practical usefulness and welfare losses associated with capital movements across countries. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for small open economies to derive a simple basket weight rule. Although this is suboptimal, we find it practical and easy to implement. With calibration using Singaporean and Thai data for 1997Q3–2006Q2 and comparison among cumulative losses associated with the policy instrument rules, we show that a commitment to the basket weight rule is superior to other instrument rules under the floating regime for small, open emerging market countries like Singapore and Thailand.

This paper investigates the nature of money supply in Australia over two separate monetary policy regimes: monetary and inflation targeting. The post-Keynesian theory on endogenous money was tested with the aim of investigating whether endogenous money supply, if it did exist, followed the accomodationist, structuralist or liquidity preference viewpoints. Data used are quarterly series from 1977 to 2007 and we used vector error-correction model for long-run and short-run causality tests. We found that money supply is endogenous in Australia even when the central bank targeted monetary aggregates during the period 1977 to 1993.

Using a services firm-level dataset for Singapore, we find that different services industries have different industry dynamics with regards to work-permit foreign workers (FWs). In the retail industry, higher FW use is associated with lower firm-level profitability. This suggests that greater industry consolidation through tighter FW allocation could improve overall productivity in the sector. On the other hand, greater FW use in the hotel industry is associated with higher firm-level productivity. This suggests that FWs represent a critical input that supports more productive firms in this tradable sector. Hence, for this sector, FW policy should be more accommodative.

This paper examines the impact of profitability, stock price performance and growth opportunity on the capital structure of firms in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. In contrast to Kayhan and Titman (2007), it is found that firms in these three Chinese-dominated economies strongly prefer debt to equity or internal fund financing. They also take advantage of stock price appreciation by issuing more shares. An adjustment model for debt ratios is estimated. The results suggest that the leverage ratios of these firms slowly adjust toward their target levels. Deviations from the target due to the pecking order and market timing effects are found to be significant.

This paper studies the role of the real money gap — the deviation of real money balance from its long-run equilibrium level — for predicting inflation in India. Using quarterly data on manufacturing inflation from 1982 to 2007, we find that the real money gap is a significant predictor of inflation in India. Our results show that this variable is a better predictor of future inflation at quarterly horizon than the deviation of broad money growth from its target for the whole sample period. We also document a break in the overall predictability of inflation in the last quarter of 1995. We find that, except for the real money gap, the forecasting power of other predictors under study has declined considerably after 1995.

We investigate the impact of the IMF-supported structural reform program in the 1997 Asian crisis on stock market efficiency using the before–after, with–without and event study approaches by applying a time-varying parameter model to eight Asian stock markets. All the supported countries, including Indonesia and Korea, but not Thailand, experienced significantly improved market efficiency after the implementation of the program, implying a positive effect of the program according to the before–after approach. Among the nonsupported countries, China, Taiwan and Malaysia did not improve efficiency (however, Hong Kong and Singapore did) after the start of the crisis, providing some evidence of a positive effect according to the with–without approach. The Thailand, Indonesia and Korean markets showed positive abnormal returns on the days or days following policy announcements in this IMF-supported program, indicating positive effects of the policy according to the event study approach. These findings suggest that the IMF program was successful during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and that it was helpful in resolving the recent global financial crisis.

This paper studies the effect of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on multilateral trading system using a sequential bargaining game. The study considers two formats of PTAs, i.e., when the PTA tariffs are specified before the formation of PTAs and when PTA members have to negotiate PTA tariffs after the formation of PTAs. The study finds that PTAs with specified tariffs can be building blocks to multilateral liberalization while PTAs without specified tariffs are stumbling blocks. The paper also concludes that PTAs can eliminate bargaining inefficiency called forward manipulation when PTA tariffs are specified before PTA negotiation.