The Singapore Economic Review

The author, now aged 90, reflects on the then highly iconoclastic National Wages Council (NWC) recommendation of a 20% yearly gross wage increase guideline for three years, 1979–1981. He emphasizes the important differences between the negotiable and the non-negotiable recommended wage increases. He also emphasizes the important difference between a pure percentage wage increase and a quantum plus percentage wage increase formula particularly in the integral economic restructuring program. The compulsory payments consisting of the important Central Provident Fund (CPF) increases and the new Restructuring Skills Development Fund (SDF) Levy. The increase in the compulsory CPF led to the formation of the Sovereign Wealth Fund — the Government Investment Corporation (GIC). The restructuring led to the creation of the SDF. The SDF was used to promote labor productivity through the then equally iconoclastic substitution of capital for labor programs. The end result of the restructuring policy was to minimize demand-pull inflationary pressures, increase the gross wages of low-wage and medium-wage workers and increase real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates, accompanied by an important fall in the Gini Coefficient of income inequality. The anti-cyclical preparedness of the high-wage economic restructuring program is also emphasized and the idea of discussing the high-wage policy in isolation is debunked.

Ownership and institutions are regarded as key determinants of firm performance. Using data of Chinese firms from 1998 to 2009, this study tests the separate and interacting effects of ownership and institutions. The divergent performance of firms can be explained from the heterogeneous ownership context, as confirmed by the literature, and through variations in the way that firms of different ownership types use and exploit institutions. Privately owned firms tend to exploit considerably larger benefits from the same institutions in comparison with foreign-owned enterprises (FEs) or state-owned enterprises (SOEs). FEs or SOEs also obtain some benefits; however, these benefits are significantly smaller than those obtained by private enterprises (PEs). Results can be attributed to the differences in the aims and incentives of firms with diverse ownership types. While the initial productivity of PEs may be lower than that of FEs at the low levels of institutional development, PEs are shown to eventually catch up with FEs because institutions develop further over time to be better exploited by PEs than FEs. Hence, any policy design should consider this coevolving nature of institutions and firm ownership; whereas private firms cannot prosper without sound institutions, institutional development may be useless unless there are private firms that can benefit from this institutional development.

This paper seeks to investigate the motivations of countries that participate in the One Belt and One Road (B&R) Initiative, a China-led economic development program with the intention of enhancing regional economic cooperation. We examine the income convergence hypothesis for B&R countries with both linear and nonlinear unit root tests to detect the presence of economic integration over the periods 1960–2016 and 1979–2016. For the B&R countries that are found to show income convergence to China in our income convergence testing, we argue that they tend to have a strong existing economic relationship with China. By contrast, the countries that have relatively weak economic relationships with China tend to show no convergence to China, and they take advantage of the B&R as an opportunity to catch up. Moreover, we find evidence that more countries converge to China’s real per capita income for the years after 1978 when China started its transition to a market economy and initiated the open-door policy to embrace globalization. The results suggest that China contributes to a higher degree of income convergence in regional integration.

We conducted a market experiment in China to examine potential effects of subjects’ hometowns on their behaviors as well as potential differences between team and individual trades. We observed that group size affected bargaining power and subsequently payoffs in different directions according to where the subjects were from. In particular, teamwork strengthened the bargaining power of the subjects from coastal areas but weakened that of the subjects from inland areas when commodity exchanges were conducted between subjects from different areas. This finding suggests that it is important to take one’s hometown into account when comparing economic behavior or decision-making between teams and individuals, especially in the countries or regions where hometown diversity plays a central role in explaining differences in business management and local market performance.

We test the bilateral causal relationship between four types of international capital flows and the real effective exchange rate (REER) in China over the period 1998:Q1 to 2016:Q2 and examine whether the link is time varying. Parameter stability tests suggest that the relationship between capital flows and the RMB REER is time varying both in the short and the long run. Bootstrap rolling-window causality tests suggest bidirectional Granger causal relationships between the current account, portfolio investments and FDI, and the REER in several sub-periods, and a Granger-causal relationship from foreign exchange reserves to the REER in some sub-periods.

This paper investigates the relationship between international trade integration and international financial integration in Asia using a dataset covering the period from 2001 to 2015. Using a simultaneous equations system, this paper sheds further light into international trade integration and international financial integration processes of Asian countries. We account for the bidirectional causality between these two variables by employing a system of simultaneous equations. Utilizing the two-stage least squares estimator, we find a positive and significant bidirectional relationship between international trade integration and international financial integration. This result has strong policy implication relating to the liberalization process in these Asian countries.

While Malaysia has fulfilled expectation of a highly liberalized market since 2009, however, her stock market is still far from fully integrated with the world market. Existing literature by far has not provided any insight on market integration of such highly liberalized yet not perfectly integrated stock market. This paper explores whether such non-perfect market integration is due to some implicit factor at firm level. Based on . Capital flow controls, international asset pricing, and investors’ welfare: A multi-country framework. The Journal of Finance, 44(4), 1025–1037 asset pricing framework, we employed a multivariate GARCH-M model to estimate the monthly market integration level of Malaysia stock market with the world over a period from January 2009 to September 2016. Subsequently, we examine whether the three firm-level implicit factors, i.e., ownership concentrations, foreign ownership and firm price delay affect the Malaysia stock market’s world integration. These firm-level factors are aggregated from firm-level data while price delay was also aggregated from estimates of weekly data at firm level. In short, we found that price delay and ownership concentrations have significant negative effects on the market level integration, with the latter having a nonlinear $U-$shape effect where ownership concentration will have a positive effect passing the threshold of 52.2%. Last but not least, foreign ownership has a significant positive effect.

This paper investigates (for the first time) the impact of the economic policy uncertainties of Singapore and its major trading partners on Singapore’s industrial production and exports. The study uses monthly data from January 2003 to August 2019, correlation analysis, spillover index analysis and a structural vector autoregression model to perform the investigation. Using the newly invented Singaporean economic policy uncertainty index, the research finds that it is a good predictor of industrial production. It is found that, in general, uncertainty depresses Singapore’s industrial production and exports. The paper suggests that policymakers promote new entrepreneurship and build a skilled labor force to minimize the impact of uncertainty on the economy of Singapore.

Changes in the oil price directly affect production costs, and subsequently, the general price level of products. With Indonesia observing an inflation targeting policy, this study applies the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) technique to investigate the effect of oil price fluctuations in Indonesia. The relationship is important for the central bank to gauge the effectiveness of the inflation targeting policy in immunizing the country from oil price fluctuations. Our findings have revealed that there was an asymmetric behavior between oil price and the inflation rate (producer price index), thus questioning the effectiveness of the inflation targeting policy. More specifically, in the long run, an increase in the oil price will tend to lead to an increase in the rate of inflation with a greater deviation, while an oil price reduction will lead to a decrease in the inflation rate with a lower deviation. This suggests that the benefits of an oil price reduction are not passed down to the consumer.

This study analyzes the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and maternity protection using Korean firm-level data. The result shows that companies with good CSR evaluation is negatively related to reinstatement rate after parental leave. It was also revealed that industries with low relevance to female workers or consumer issues and firms with good corporate governance indicators is negatively related to maternity protection. Firms are attracted to external social issues, rather than internal labor standards, such as parental leave. This study examined various causes that lead to these results.

This paper studies the relationship between monthly economic uncertainty of 20 advanced and emerging markets, and two daily covariates, i.e., exchange rate and stock index, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the variables in response to the Brexit vote. We use a functional data approach supplemented with a point of impact structure to conduct a mixed-frequency analysis. We find that incorporating the point of impact, in this case the Brexit shock, is marginally important relative to models that ignore it. We also find that the exchange rate played a more important role than the equity market in transmitting the Brexit shock to cause heightened uncertainty in the 20 countries considered. Our results have important policy implications.

Recent research in macroeconomics has sought to develop a tractable form of heterogeneity in attempting to model sluggish responses in the price level. In addition, economists have struggled to explain why the demand for safe assets has increased as evidenced by the decline in real interest rates and even nominal interest rates in the last three decades [King, M (2017). Uncertainty and large swings in activity. In National Bureau of Economic Research Martin Feldstein Lecture, Cambridge, MA: NBER Summer Institute; King, M and D Low (2014). Measuring the ‘World’ Interest Rate. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 19887, Cambridge, MA]. We build a simple two-period lived overlapping generations model that displays both heterogeneity of expectations and robustness. Our goal is to derive the economic impacts associated with greater uncertainty; more specifically, to answer the question can these two versions of uncertainty account for an increase in the demand for money and the low return on safe assets? Since analysis of even such a simple model requires a lot of technical work, we put most of this technical work into a rather lengthy technical Appendix for the benefit of readers who wish to follow such details. The main text in the paper will just focus on the basic economics.

This paper analyzes the effects of the household savings rate, interest rate spread and bank capital to total assets on the relationship between banks’ risk-taking and explicit deposit insurance coverage while controlling for certain macroeconomic factors, bank-level factors and political factors with data from 50 emerging markets. It is found that the U-shaped relationship between banks’ risk-taking and coverage is more apparent in countries with higher household savings rates, lower interest rate spreads or lower bank capital to total assets. The risk-minimizing coverage settings are analyzed and compared with the actual limits for emerging market economies in 2013. For emerging market countries, the effects of the household savings rate, deposit and loan spreads and banks’ capital to assets ratio should be fully considered when setting reasonable deposit insurance coverage, and their interaction with coverage should be emphasized.

This paper presents a simple method for estimating the size of environmental capital (KN) assets that are otherwise mistaken as infinite. An illustration is provided for Australia’s air shed. The method draws on the perpetual inventory method (PIM) used in macroeconomics for measuring the size of manufactured capital (KM) stock. While the application of the PIM for measuring KM is based on net accumulation over time, with KN it involves net depreciation over time. The depreciation, however, can be negated by the resilience capabilities of KN assets based on their biophysical characteristics. Owing to sparse data, two proxy methods for estimating the resilience coefficient are developed. These proxies rely on emission targets and standards that have been discussed in Australia’s policy context.

Using Vietnamese panel data, we investigate how a father’s temporary migration is associated with the labor supply and human capital investment of his child left behind. Our analysis shows that a longer absence of a father is associated with more housework and less education of his son if the boy is at an age for primary or lower secondary schooling.

This study evaluates the partial exclusion effects of store promotion. We find that a manufacturer with a better brand name has a higher willingness-to-pay for promotion services offered by retail stores or online platforms. The promotion results in higher sales-weighted average prices (wholesale and retail) and a larger inter-brand price gap. The stores or platforms extract more profits from manufacturers and consumers through the promotion services. The effects on consumer surplus and social welfare depend on whether the promotion alters consumer preferences. If it does, more consumers would be choosing their less-preferred brands because of the larger inter-brand price gap, which would be socially inefficient. If it does not, the promotion may help to correct the price distortion, but the social welfare effect is positive only when the promotion effect is small enough. In both cases, the promotion services reduce the total consumer surplus by softening inter-brand competition.

In this paper, we experimentally examine the relative strength of direct reciprocity and serial reciprocity. In three between–subject treatments, we solicit individual’s direct reciprocal giving and serial reciprocal giving in incentivized experiments where subjects make single or joint giving decisions. We find that, for both single and joint decisions, direct reciprocal giving and serial reciprocal giving are equivalent in magnitude. Meanwhile, an additional option of giving causes subjects to adjust their allocations between themselves and others, but this increase in total giving is not proportional to the increase in the number of recipients. This study provides new evidence of the complex relationship between direct reciprocity and serial reciprocity.

With China’s rapidly aging population, this paper constructs a policy model using overlapping generation (OLG) model and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling to analyze the second-child policy and delaying retirement policy. Our research findings suggest that considering the short-term effects, delaying the retirement age imposes a greater impact on the economy than the second-child policy. Its economic impact increases initially, but then decreases to a stable level showing a diminishing influence. In the long term, the second-child policy has greater ability to boost the economy than the delaying retirement age policy and its economic impact gets stronger. From an industrial output perspective, the two policies exert greater influence on agriculture, light industry, finance and service sector than on construction and heavy industries. From an industrial import and export perspective, the two policies have great influence on finance, electric power, and fossil energy more than they do on the agricultural sector. From a monetary perspective, the impacts are greater on household income followed by the government income and corporate income, respectively. The policies also make a bigger difference to fixed capital than to changes in deposits and loans.

The determining of exports and imports independently, which is a common assumption in the literature, may be over restrictive for extremely open economies. As an alternative, this study proposes and estimates structural models for the simultaneous determination of trade flows in three extremely open economies (Ireland, Belgium and Singapore). It confirms the existence of an interrelation between exports and imports and, as a result, the existence of a bias in the estimates of trade elasticities when the interrelation is not taken into account.