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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Geographic Decomposition Of Inequality In Health And Wealth: Evidence From Cambodia, Tomoki Fujii Dec 2007

Geographic Decomposition Of Inequality In Health And Wealth: Evidence From Cambodia, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

The small-area estimation developed by Elbers, Lanjouw and Lanjouw (2002, 2003), in which a census and a survey are combined to produce the estimates of welfare measures for small geographic areas, has become a standard tool for poverty analysis in developing countries. The small-area estimates are typically plotted on a map, which are commonly called a poverty map. Poverty maps proved useful for policy analysis and formulation, and have become increasingly popular among policy-makers and researchers. In Cambodia, poverty maps have been used by various international organizations, ministries and non-governmental organizations for analyzing the poverty situations for their operation areas, …


Singapore's Exchange Rate Policy: Some Implementation Issues, Hwee Kwan Chow Dec 2007

Singapore's Exchange Rate Policy: Some Implementation Issues, Hwee Kwan Chow

Research Collection School Of Economics

Reflecting the small open nature of its economy, Singapore has adopted an exchange rate-centered monetary policy framework since 1981. The exchange rate regime in Singapore is an intermediate regime that follows the basket-band-crawl system. With this managed float system, the MAS has successfully deterred speculators from attacking the domestic currency for most of the past three decades. At the same time, the flexibility accorded by the managed float system aided Singapore in escaping from the 1997–1998 Asian crisis relatively unscathed. In order to advance our understanding of the hitherto successful operation of Singapore's exchange rate policy, we examine the following …


Wage Inequality, Intergenerational Mobility, And Education In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho Oct 2007

Wage Inequality, Intergenerational Mobility, And Education In Singapore, Kong Weng Ho

Research Collection School Of Economics

Accompanying Singapore’s phenomenal economic growth over the past four decades has been a rapid increase in educational attainment over the years. In 1960, the mean years of schooling for residents aged 25 and over was 3.14 years; in 2006, it was 9.3 years. This dramatic increase in the supply of skilled labour in all sectors of the economy helped to power Singapore’s high growth rates over the past few decades of economic development, which also saw declining wage inequality and high upward intergenerational mobility in education. However, we need to ask if these trends will continue in the future and …


Forecasting The Car Penetration Rate (Cpr) In China: A Nonparametric Approach, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su Sep 2007

Forecasting The Car Penetration Rate (Cpr) In China: A Nonparametric Approach, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

With strong economic growth, the auto industry has made great breakthroughs in recent years and has become a backbone industry in China, while cars play an increasingly important role, and are now the principal part of the auto industry. Both China's government and academic circles take strong interest in the prediction of CPR (i.e. car penetration rate or cars per thousand people), which will be the main guidance for the future industry policy. We summarize the existing problems in recent research and propose to use nonparametric methods to estimate the CPR and its elasticity with respect to GDP per capita …


Modeling Country Risks: An Asian Perspective, Swee Liang Tan, G. K. Randolph Tan Sep 2007

Modeling Country Risks: An Asian Perspective, Swee Liang Tan, G. K. Randolph Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the use of the Markov Regime Switching Model (MRSM) as a means to track changes in the levels of investor confidence. It also assesses the probabilities of a country switching between different regimes using the transition probability matrix. A maximum of three possible levels or regimes of risk – low, intermediate and high volatility regimes, is considered. From the smoothed probabilities calculated for different regimes, this paper makes inferences about timings of debt crisis. Comparing Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia in particular, we date the onset and subsequent dissolution of crisis-induced panic. We give interpretations of …


Characterizing Exchange Rate Policy In East Asia: A Reconsideration, Hwee Kwan Chow, Yoonbai Kim, Wei Sun Jun 2007

Characterizing Exchange Rate Policy In East Asia: A Reconsideration, Hwee Kwan Chow, Yoonbai Kim, Wei Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

Frankel and Wei (1994) developed and popularized a method for uncovering the implicit weights assigned to major international currencies constituting a currency basket. We extend the methodology in two dimensions: include regional competitive pressure and employ a vector autoregressive (VAR) model to overcome simultaneity bias. With these modifications, we confirm the prominent role of the US dollar in the exchange rate policy of East Asian economies beyond the short run. However, despite the high degree of commitment to nominal exchange rate stability prior to the crisis, fluctuations in most East Asian currencies are also significantly influenced by country specific shocks. …


Financial Liberalization And Monetary Policy Cooperation In East Asia, Hwee Kwan Chow, Peter N. Kriz, Roberto S. Mariano, Augustine H. H. Tan May 2007

Financial Liberalization And Monetary Policy Cooperation In East Asia, Hwee Kwan Chow, Peter N. Kriz, Roberto S. Mariano, Augustine H. H. Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

As the countries in East Asia embark on financial liberalization, a key issue that confronts policymakers is the greater complexity of risks that is injected into the financial system. In particular, capital account liberalization may potentially increase the vulnerability of individual countries to external financial shocks. This paper advocates the optimally cascading of financial liberalization that is consistent across three dimensions: extent of domestic financial liberalization; the degree of exchange rate flexibility; and the scope of capital account liberalization. Unless the process of liberalization is properly managed, it could provoke destabilizing capital flows and lead to volatile exchange rates. Smooth …


Global And Regional Sources Of Risk In Equity Markets: Evidence From Factor Models With Time-Varying Conditional Skewness, Aamir R. Hashmi, Anthony S. Tay Apr 2007

Global And Regional Sources Of Risk In Equity Markets: Evidence From Factor Models With Time-Varying Conditional Skewness, Aamir R. Hashmi, Anthony S. Tay

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine the influence of global and regional factors on the conditional distribution of stock returns from six Asian markets, using factor models in which unexpected returns comprise global, regional and local shocks. The models allow for conditional heteroskedasticity and time-varying conditional skewness, and are used to measure mean, variance, and skewness spillovers. We find that incorporating time-varying conditional skewness improves the fit of our spillover models, and can alter measurements of variance spillovers. However, time-varying conditional skewness is mostly a local phenomenon; with exceptions, there is little spillover in skewness from global and regional factors.


Asian Currency Baskets: A Useful Surveillance Tool?, Charles Adams, Hwee Kwan Chow Mar 2007

Asian Currency Baskets: A Useful Surveillance Tool?, Charles Adams, Hwee Kwan Chow

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers whether an intra-regional currency basket and the associated divergence indicators could play a useful role in official exchange rate surveillance. Recently, proponents of an Asian currency basket have referred to the role the European Currency Unit played in constructing exchange rate divergence indicators as evidence of the usefulness of intra-regional currency baskets for exchange rate monitoring. The paper shows that such indicators have a number of features that can lead to them obscuring underlying changes in exchange rates and that the signals they emit will often be difficult to interpret. In addition, the use of regional currency …


Business Output And Business Experience: Evidence From China's Nongovernmental Businesses, Liangjun Su Feb 2007

Business Output And Business Experience: Evidence From China's Nongovernmental Businesses, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the application of the Solow growth model in China's non-governmental businesses and propose a reasonable modification for it. Our analysis indicates that business experience is closely tied to the output of China's non-governmental businesses. Our major findings include: (1) the business experience has little overall impact on the elasticity of output with respect to labour; (2) the business experience has a large impact on the elasticity of output with respect to capital and the elasticity increases as the business experience increases; (3) the adjusted Solow residual that reflects technological progress exhibits a negative relationship with the business experience, …


Open Vs Sealed Bid Auctions: Testing For Revenue Equivalence Under Singapore's Vehicle Quota System, Roberto S. Mariano, Winston T. H. Koh, Yiu Kuen Tse Jan 2007

Open Vs Sealed Bid Auctions: Testing For Revenue Equivalence Under Singapore's Vehicle Quota System, Roberto S. Mariano, Winston T. H. Koh, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using data from the auction of vehicle quota licenses in Singapore, we study if revenue equivalence holds when the auction format was switched from a sealed-bid format (May 1990 to June 2001) to an open bidding format since July 2001. Our econometric analysis indicates the change in auction format led to a change in bidding behavior. On average, the quota license premium under the open bidding format is about US$1000 (about 7.5% of the Category E license price in June 2001) lower, compared to the forecast level that would have prevailed if there had been no change in the auction …


The Singapore Model Of Housing And The Welfare State, Sock Yong Phang Jan 2007

The Singapore Model Of Housing And The Welfare State, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

While Singapore is not generally regarded as a welfare state, the provision of housing welfare on a large scale has been a defining feature of its welfare system. The extensive housing system has played a useful role in raising savings and homeownership rates as well as contributing to sustained economic growth in general and development of the housing sector in particular. Few would dispute the description of Singapore’s housing policies as 'phenomenally successful' (Ramesh, 2003). Singapore’s economic growth record in the past four decades has brought it from third world to first world status (Lee, 2000), with homeownership widespread at …


To Use Or Not To Use?: Poverty Mapping In Cambodia, Tomoki Fujii Jan 2007

To Use Or Not To Use?: Poverty Mapping In Cambodia, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

No abstract provided.