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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

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Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration

2005

Singapore Management University

Articles 1 - 14 of 14

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

E-Government Capabilities And Crisis Management: Lessons From Combating Sars In Singapore, Shan Ling Pan, Gary Pan, Paul R. Devadoss Dec 2005

E-Government Capabilities And Crisis Management: Lessons From Combating Sars In Singapore, Shan Ling Pan, Gary Pan, Paul R. Devadoss

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The city-state of Singapore has been highly ranked for its e-government services. Over the past two decades, it has leveraged its IT infrastructure for economic development and transformed its public services. The SARS outbreak in 2004 turned into a national health crisis because it spread rapidly and the medical community had little knowledge of how to treat the new mutation of the corona virus. Yet, several Singaporean government agencies utilized the e-Government infrastructure and related resources to quickly bring the outbreak under control. In particular, the government?s IT infrastructure streamlined communications, information exchange, and data flow, and significantly eased collaboration …

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A Spatial Analysis Of The Xiii Italian Legislature, Massimiliano Landi, Riccardo Pelizzo Nov 2005

A Spatial Analysis Of The Xiii Italian Legislature, Massimiliano Landi, Riccardo Pelizzo

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We present a spatial map of the Italian House of Deputies during the XIII Legislature obtained by applying the Poole and Rosenthal methodology to roll call data. We estimate coordinates for almost all the 650 Deputies that were on the House’s floor at the time, and we aggregate them according to parties. We find that voting patters generate basically a two dimensional political space. The first dimension represents loyalty to either the ruling coalition or the opposing one. The second dimension is represented by the European Union. These findings are consistent with the exceptional case of the party Northern League, …

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Manpower Planning And University Enrollments: The Debate In Singapore, Eng Fong Pang, Linda Y. C. Lim Oct 2005

Manpower Planning And University Enrollments: The Debate In Singapore, Eng Fong Pang, Linda Y. C. Lim

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Faced with growing resource constraints, many countries are grappling with the issue of how best to allocate resources to publicly funded universities. Quite a few governments have used manpower planning models to guide policies regarding university enrollments and resource allocation. These models typically derive educational enrollments from projected manpower requirements based on forecasts of economic growth. Recent public debate on university admissions policy in Singapore raises anew the question of the effectiveness of the manpower planning model that Singapore (and many other countries) relies on to guide university intakes. The Singapore government is committed to giving its universities greater autonomy …

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Growth Is Good For Whom, When, How?, John A. Donaldson Oct 2005

Growth Is Good For Whom, When, How?, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Economic growth often helps the poor, but what about the many cases when it does not? The consensus that economic growth reduces poverty, encapsulated by two World Bank economists in the above-quoted article entitled Growth is Good for the Poor, leaves many important questions unanswered. What help does the knowledge that economic growth can reduce poverty provide for economies with few realistic prospects for robust, sustained growth? What hope does the understanding that growth reduces poverty on average provide for poor families that are excluded from prosperity? How should we respond when economic growth undermines the market positions of the …

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The State, The Market, Economic Growth And Poverty In China, John A. Donaldson Oct 2005

The State, The Market, Economic Growth And Poverty In China, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The People’s Republic of China is often cited as an unprecedented success story as far as rural poverty is concerned. Despite recent reports of sometimes violent protests in rural areas over illicit land seizures and pollution, since implementing reforms in 1978, China has seen rural poverty rates fall from xxx to yyy, as economic growth increased zzz on average each year, according to World Bank estimates. Some have ascribed liberal policy prescriptions based on open markets and pro-market government policies as are largely responsible, even as they forwent expensive, large-scale mass welfare programs. Starting with their initial round of fundamental …

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Cultural Economy: A Critical Review, Chris Gibson, Lily Kong Oct 2005

Cultural Economy: A Critical Review, Chris Gibson, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article reviews work on 'cultural economy', particularly from within geography, and from other disciplines, where there are links to overtly geographical debates. We seek to clarify different interpretations of the term and to steer a course through this multivalency to suggest productive new research agendas. We review and critique work on cultural economy that represents a relatively straightforward economic geography, based on empirical observation while theoretically informed and driven by debates about Fordism and post-Fordism, agglomeration and cluster theory. Some of these ideas about cultural economy have proven attractive to policy-makers and we map a normative script of cultural …

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Partial Adjustable Autonomy In Multi-Agent Environment And Its Application To Military Logistics, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Ramesh Thangarajoo Sep 2005

Partial Adjustable Autonomy In Multi-Agent Environment And Its Application To Military Logistics, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Ramesh Thangarajoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In a rapidly changing environment, the behavior and decision-making power of agents may have to be adaptive with respect to a fluctuating autonomy. In this paper, a centralized fuzzy approach is proposed to sense changes in environmental conditions and translate them to changes in agent autonomy. A distributed coalition formation scheme is then applied to allow agents in the new autonomy to renegotiate to establish schedule consistency. The proposed framework is applied to a real-time logistics control of a military hazardous material storage facility under peace-to-war transition.

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Religious Schools: For Spirit, (F)Or Nation, Lily Kong Aug 2005

Religious Schools: For Spirit, (F)Or Nation, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper I draw attention to the study of 'unofficially sacred' sites in geographies of religion, which provide significant insights into the construction of religious identity and community, and the intersections of sacred and secular. I show that such sites deserve as much attention as places of worship (the more conventional focus in the geographical study of religion) in our understanding of the place of religion in contemporary urban society. In particular, using the case of Islamic religious schools in Singapore, I examine how Muslim identities and community are negotiated within multicultural and multireligious contexts, and particularly within one …

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From Academia To Diplomacy And Back, Eng Fong Pang Aug 2005

From Academia To Diplomacy And Back, Eng Fong Pang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Prof Pang talked about his experiences as a diplomat in South Korea and Europe during the period 1994-2002.

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Dispatching Vehicles In A Mega Container Terminal, Ebru K. Bish, Frank Y. Chen, Thin Yin Leong, Barry L. Nelson, Jonathan W. C. Ng, David Simchi-Levi Aug 2005

Dispatching Vehicles In A Mega Container Terminal, Ebru K. Bish, Frank Y. Chen, Thin Yin Leong, Barry L. Nelson, Jonathan W. C. Ng, David Simchi-Levi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We consider a container terminal discharging and uploading containers to and from ships. The discharged containers are stored at prespecified storage locations in the terminal yard. Containers are moved between the ship area and the yard using a fleet of vehicles, each of which can carry one container at a time. The problem is to dispatch vehicles to the containers so as to minimize the total time it takes to serve a ship, which is the total time it takes to discharge all containers from the ship and upload new containers onto the ship. We develop easily implementable heuristic algorithms …

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Competing At The Frontier: The Changing Role Of Technology Policy In Singapore's Economic Strategy, Winston T. H. Koh, Poh Kam Wong Mar 2005

Competing At The Frontier: The Changing Role Of Technology Policy In Singapore's Economic Strategy, Winston T. H. Koh, Poh Kam Wong

Research Collection School Of Economics

For an economy competing at the global frontier, an innovation-based growth strategy requires a well-developed technological infrastructure, a set of capabilities-focused technology policies, as well as an institutional environment that stimulates innovation and entrepreneurship. This paper examines the role played by science and technology policy in an economy's transition to an innovation-based growth strategy. We discuss the challenges governments face as they restructure economic institutions to deepen R&D capabilities and encourage technology creation. We review Singapore's experience in this regard and assess its ongoing efforts to remake itself to compete at the global frontier.

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Report Of The Committee On Fare Review Mechanism, Sock Yong Phang Feb 2005

Report Of The Committee On Fare Review Mechanism, Sock Yong Phang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Today, public transport fares are reviewed annually and adjustments, if any, are capped by the “CPI + X” formula, where CPI is the change in the Consumer Price Index over the previous year and X accounts for the net effect of wage changes after deducting productivity gains. For the period from 2001 to 2005, X was determined to be 1.5%. While this mechanism has worked well in keeping public transport fares affordable, the formula lacks transparency and is not easily understood by the general public. Commuters often question the need for the “X” element given that the public transport operators …

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Social And Cultural Geographies Of South-East Asia, Tim Bunnell, Lily Kong, Lisa Law Feb 2005

Social And Cultural Geographies Of South-East Asia, Tim Bunnell, Lily Kong, Lisa Law

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The paper is an overview of English language publications that discuss what might be considered 'social' and 'cultural' geographies in Southeast Asia over the past two decades. We have strategically chosen two major themes that help us shape the mass of material into digestible strands: (1) the politics of social and cultural change; and (2) constructing identities. The former addresses various politics: the politics of nationhood; the politics of national development; the politics of cultural sites; the politics of urban change; and the politics of the global-local.

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Religious Processions: Urban Politics And Poetics, Lily Kong Jan 2005

Religious Processions: Urban Politics And Poetics, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this paper, I will explore the ways in which processions, by their very visibility, foreground the relationships between the secular and the sacred, while contributing to a construction of identity and community, and simultaneously surfacing fractures therein. Using the example of multireligious yet secular Singapore, I will examine (a) the state's management of religious processions, including the regulation of time and space for such events, as well as regulations over noise production; (b) the tactics of adaptation, negotiation and resistance that participants engage in at an everyday level in response to the state's ideologies, policies, laws and strategies; (c) …

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