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Articles 1 - 8 of 8
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Challenges To Social Mobility In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho, Marcus Kheng Tat Tan
Challenges To Social Mobility In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho, Marcus Kheng Tat Tan
Research Collection School Of Economics
Singapore had achieved impressive economic growth together with a high level of upward mobility since her independence in 1965. However, the growth process might have become more uneven, in addition to diminishing growth for a matured economy like Singapore, which is also a highly open city state subject to competitive forces from other economies. Singapore has fared well recently,
evident from the 2020 social mobility findings reported by the World Economic Forum and the decline in Gini coefficients for the past decade. We discuss the education system in Singapore and the recently formed National Jobs Council, both important institutions for …
Building An Equitable And Inclusive City Through Housing Policies: Singapore’S Experience, Sock Yong Phang
Building An Equitable And Inclusive City Through Housing Policies: Singapore’S Experience, Sock Yong Phang
Research Collection School Of Economics
Inequality is an age-old concern. In recent years, the rise of income inequality has received worldwide media and policy attention, beginning with the Occupy movement of 2011-2012 and a wave of notable scholastic books such as Stiglitz (2012), Piketty (2014), and Atkinson (2015). Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, an unlikely bestseller, contained a vast amount of data showing that the rich are taking rising shares of income and wealth in the advanced economies. Piketty’s approach towards capital and wealth is an aggregative one, and he does not treat real estate or land as a different or distinct form of …
Has The Development Gap Between The Ethnic Minority And Majority Groups Narrowed In Vietnam?: Evidence From Household Surveys, Tomoki Fujii
Has The Development Gap Between The Ethnic Minority And Majority Groups Narrowed In Vietnam?: Evidence From Household Surveys, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
Using household data for rural northern Vietnam between 1993 and 2014, we find that the ethnic minority group continued to lag behind the majority group in various development indicators despite the overall improvement in living standards. Our regression and decomposition analyses show that the structural differences between the two groups are an important cause of persistent development gap. However, the nature of structural differences changed over time and no single source of structural difference explains the persistent gap. We argue that more minority‐appropriate policies are needed to lift poor minority households out of poverty further and reduce the development gap.
Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii
Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
In this paper, we propose a new method of poverty decomposition. Our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time-revision consistency and subperiod additivity. It integrates the existing methods of growth-redistribution decomposition and sector based decomposition, because it allows us to decompose poverty change into growth and redistribution components for each group (e.g., regions or sectors) in the economy. We extend out method to have six components and provide empirical application to the Philippines for the period of 1985 to 2009.
Borrower Targeting Under Microfinance: Competition With Motivated Microfinance Institutions And Strategic Complementarity, Brishti Guha, Prabal Roy Chowdhury
Borrower Targeting Under Microfinance: Competition With Motivated Microfinance Institutions And Strategic Complementarity, Brishti Guha, Prabal Roy Chowdhury
Research Collection School Of Economics
We examine how increased competition among motivated microfinance institutions (MFIs) impacts the poorest borrowers’ access to microfinance. We find that competition depends on inequality, technology, and the possibility of double-dipping (borrowing from several sources). Without competition, even a motivated MFI may lend to the not-so-poor in preference to poor borrowers. If double-dipping is feasible, competition may encourage lending to the poor. The presence of double-dipping is critical for MFI competition to have a positive effect. When double-dipping is feasible, MFI coordination may worsen borrower targeting whenever inequality is intermediate. We discuss policy implications dealing with double-dipping, MFI coordination, and competition.
Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii
Dynamic Poverty Decomposition Analysis: An Application To The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii
Research Collection School Of Economics
In this paper, we propose a new method of poverty decomposition. Our method remedies the shortcomings of existing methods and has some desirable properties such as time-reversion consistency and subperiod additivity. It integrates the existing methods of growth-redistribution decomposition and sector-based decomposition, because it allows us to decompose poverty change into growth and redistribution components for each group (e.g. regions or sectors) in the economy. We extend our method to have six components and provide an empirical application to the Philippines for the period 1985-2009.
Micro-Finance Competition With Motivated Mfis, Brishti Guha, Prabal Roy Chowdhury
Micro-Finance Competition With Motivated Mfis, Brishti Guha, Prabal Roy Chowdhury
Research Collection School Of Economics
In this paper we examine the effect of increased MFI competition, focusing on its implications for borrower targeting, both in the presence and the absence of double-dipping. In the absence of competition we find that the loans are more likely to go to relatively richer borrowers whenever inequality is not too large, and the technology is sufficiently convex. In the presence of competition, the results depend on whether double-dipping is feasible or not. In case double-dipping is not feasible, we find that the MFIs necessarily target the richer borrowers. Interestingly, it turns out that double-dipping may encourage the MFIs to …
Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante
Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante
Research Collection School Of Economics
In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guaranteeing the quality of governance and redistribution. We argue and demonstrate with historical evidence that the concentration of population around the policy making center serves as an insurgency threat to a dictatorship, inducing it to yield to more redistribution and better governance. We bring this centered concept of population concentration to the data through the Centered Index …