We study roughly 11,000 loans from unlicensed moneylenders to over 1,000 borrowers in Singapore and provide basic information about this understudied market. Borrowers frequently expect to repay late. While lenders do rely on additional punishments to enforce loans, the primary cost of not...

We derive aggregate growth-accounting implications for a two-sector economy with heterogeneous capital subsidies and monopoly power. In this economy, measures of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in terms of quantities (the primal) and real factor prices (the dual) can diverge from each...

Singapore's experience with international capital flows over the past two decades or so has been a rather -- although not completely -- benign one, owing to strong fundamentals and generally well-conceived macro-economic policies. We begin by briefly discussing the experience in 1998 of Hong...

In countries, such as Singapore, that have implemented vehicle congestion policies, recent years have seen a shift towards motor vehicle taxes based on car use. Ownership taxes reduce the number of cars on the road, leaving the price per trip largely unaffected. Use taxes such as fuel taxes and...

In this paper we derive and compare the value of life annuity products in an international context. Our specific goal is to assess the money's worth and adverse selection impact of annuities in two countries Singapore and Australia that have mandatory DC-type retirement plans. This similarity in...

After a brief introduction and examination of the economic rationale for accounting for foreign direct investment (FDI), we survey information on outward investors from Hong Kong and Singapore with the aim of illuminating the implications of accounting for such FDI by geographical source or by...

This paper discusses the likely evolution of the trade and environment issue in the World Trade Organization after the upcoming ministerial meeting in Singapore this December. It makes a number of points. Progress within the GATT/WTO on this issue looks likely to be slow and painfully...

By looking at how an East Asian currency moves when the yen fluctuates sharply against the US dollar, we sometimes find that the reaction has been much more significant than would be suggested by the econometric estimates of the weight of the yen in nominal exchange rate determination. Moreover,...

This paper documents the fundamental role played by factor accumulation in explaining the extraordinary postwar growth of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Participation rates, educational levels and (with the exception of Hong Kong) investment rates have risen rapidly in all four...

We examine the factors that determine the differences in ex ante returns on equities in eleven Pacific Basin countries. Our concern is whether real return differentials are primarily caused by nominal return differentials or expected changes in real exchange rates. We find that nominal return...